


Seven Simple Machines

by fluorescentgrey



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Adventure, Alternate Universe, Angst, Apocalypse, Azkaban, Drug Use, M/M, Unhealthy Relationships, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-21
Updated: 2017-10-21
Packaged: 2019-01-19 06:57:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 59,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12405345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: From Azkaban, seven machines for remembering the who, the why, and the what now.written for r/s games 2017





	1. Chapter 1

Remus was sitting on the curb in front of the convenience store on the edge of town where the Greyhound bus twice daily unloaded shiftless passengers. Down in the wooded hollow past which the rural road turned to dirt and gravel again it subsequently regained the interstate and carried on to Greenville. It was dusk and Sirius had left the table in the middle of dinner when the clock on the mantle struck the hour with impressive finitude. His mother had had one of the Christian AM stations on in the Buick and he hadn’t exactly registered it enough to turn it off or turn the volume down and as such when he pulled up in front of Remus on the curb with the window open it took him a moment to realize why that thing twisted not-unbadly in Remus’s mouth and in the black door behind his eyes. 

“Oh — sorry — ”

“It’s alright — ”

“ — my brain is like, scrambled…” 

Remus got in the car. He was sunburnt across the bridge of the nose and his clothes were rumpled. The rough green canvas backpack which he tossed into the backseat of the car seemed very light and something in it rattled like a maraca or a bottle of pills. The convenience shop owner was watching them out the wide window between the cigarette ads whilst pretending to restock the magazines. Sirius stepped on the gas. 

“How’s your head,” Remus said. He had put his scabby elbow out the window. 

Sirius found a radio station that was playing the Stones’ “Time Is On My Side.” “Fine,” he said. 

“Really?” 

“No. How’s yours?”

“Bad.” 

“You didn’t even get hit.” 

“No. I didn’t.” 

Sirius had caught shrapnel in the temple in Hue in mid-February. Some days he thought probably he had died then and had been thrust into a different universe or at least a different body. The challenging thing was he couldn’t remember very well what the previous one had been like. 

“Your letters were different,” Remus said. “Like your writing is completely different in your letters.” 

“I hadn’t noticed.” 

“I did. I mean you didn’t even tell me you got hit in the head. James had to tell me.” 

He shouldn’t’ve brought up James or the letters and he knew it. He looked back out the window at the wreckage of the summer. Probably before he’d left they’d shaved his head. There was a little nick at the nape of his neck just above the collar of his white shirt. 

“That’s how I knew anyway,” Remus said out the window. The wind and music snatched it like fabric and blew it away. 

“Where were you before you left,” Sirius asked him. 

“Near Danang.” 

“Doing what?” 

Remus didn’t say anything. 

“How’d they let you leave?” 

“They try to cycle people out you know. From the jungle.”

“They do?” 

“Yeah, I guess they learned.” 

“Took them long enough.” 

“Yeah.” 

He was running his hands thoughtfully over the knees of his jeans. One of his fingernails was just gone. 

“I was thinking tomorrow we could go to the cemetery,” Sirius said. 

“I’m not going to the funeral.” 

“No — I know. That’s on Sunday anyway. We could see — ”

“ — yeah. Alright. My ma wrote to me,” Remus said, “about the funeral.” 

“James’s? I mean, I guess it was nice — ”

“No, about this one.” 

“What did she say?” 

“That I should go.” 

“Is she going?” 

“Yeah.” 

Remus’s mother hadn’t even left the church after all that. But it had been years since Sirius had even thought about it and like most things from way back when it now seemed as a function of the traumatic brain injury that it had happened to someone else. 

“She wrote about James’s funeral too. She said it was nice. She said she didn’t think you knew who she was.” 

“I did,” Sirius lied. His brother had had to tell him. 

“She said the flowers,” said Remus. But he couldn’t go on. 

“We could go to the cemetery tomorrow,” Sirius said again. “It’s a different one anyway. A Jewish one. It’s halfway to Atlanta.” 

“That’s fine.”

“It was hot as hell that day. That’s mostly what I remember. Since then I haven’t been back. It was funny not having you there.” 

“Funny.” 

“Just — I mean I knew I wasn’t the only one left alive — ”

Remus put his elbow out the window again this time loudly, and he looked almost violently away, because he wanted to say something but couldn’t. The radio and the sound the car made against the asphalt was Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man.” 

“Radio from the college,” Sirius said after a while. 

“Huh.” 

“You know I’ve learned a lot about — well the kind of countercultural opposition. Since. Just listening to the radio.” 

“What do you think about it.” 

“I want to tell them, most of the communists I’ve met weren’t quite so sweet.” 

“It isn’t even about that anyway. Tell them it isn’t even about that anyway.” 

“You wrote me about that — didn’t you write me about that?” 

“Yeah well that letter — I wasn’t in my mind.” 

“Where were you?” 

“Elsewhere. Like way back in the old elsewhere.” 

Like the thousand yard stare he’d had at age thirteen in their seventh grade classroom directed at the semblance of math problems on the blackboard and at his secondhand loafers against the scuffed tile and at the edge of the forest. “Something’s wrong,” James said. He’d made up some excuse about needing Sirius’s help to lock up his new bike while Remus went into the drugstore downtown for an egg cream accompanied by someone else without a face. “I can tell. Something bad.” 

This too: the someone else he’d been living inside then hadn’t really been able to fathom bad things in the same way. 

“You can call them up at the radio station and tell them now that you’re back,” Sirius said, to change the subject as much as ever it could be changed. “Tell them, what’d you say, it’s the children’s crusade phase of a four-hundred year colonial mission — ”

“Yeah, you know, some nonsense,” said Remus out the window. In Remus’s mind, or at least apparently in his not-right mind, nothing was really as it seemed and in fact it was a symbol for something else, like probably even riding with Sirius in the car was a symbol, and certainly all of Georgia was one, and the war was another one; even America was one, so the army as such was one, and the draft was another, and it went all the way down, because his shaved head was a symbol, and his backpack which was empty was a symbol, and the song on the radio was a symbol. 

When you looked at things like that even the worst that happened to you was unsurprising and indeed when it happened it had an air of inevitability. Which was of course why Remus was the way he was. Sirius thought he once had been able to deal with this very well and even at first during the Tet he had been able to imagine that this in fact was only really happening as a kind of red bead on the chain of fate. But then that had also gotten blown out of his mind with most of the rest of it. Now it felt like everything hurt more, and was jagged and red-hot at the edges of it, wounded, wounding, gouging, like a brand. 

“Should I bring you to your ma’s,” Sirius asked. 

“God, no.” 

“Back to the plantation house then…” 

As kids they’d run about Sirius’s family property playing Cowboys and Indians. It indeed had been a plantation house long ago and looked the part, though it had been maintained rather poorly in Sirius’s lifetime owing to his parents’ money troubles. There had been a townhouse in Savannah and a bungalow in Daytona Beach also which had been mortgaged. When Sirius was in high school his parents sold most of the property around the house to a developer who had set about building gaudy split-levels that were visible from the master bedroom porch even through the thick foliage. 

“Alright,” said Remus. 

“There must be dinner leftovers — ”

“ _Alright._ ” 

“Meredith roasted a chicken with, you know with carrots and mushrooms like she used to — ”

“Sirius.” 

“What?” 

“It’s fine.” 

He’d known it was going to happen, he sometimes thought. He’d reflected on it extensively from the hospital bed in Decatur. Of course it was difficult, because all that had happened to another person. But he thought he remembered quite clearly that from the moment it began he had understood he would be getting Medivac’d out perhaps in a black bag. He remembered he couldn’t be too bothered to worry so much about it. That was the function of having taught himself to think about things the way Remus thought about things. 

They were sleeping in this house, and usually they had to be very quiet because they couldn’t tell where the VC were. Sometimes they listened to music and usually they listened to Dylan. _Mama’s in the factory she ain’t got no shoes… Daddy’s in the alley he’s looking for food… I was in the kitchen with the tombstone blues…_ This kid from the Bronx had cassette tapes he kept in a waterproof bag so the rot wouldn’t get to them and when he died they were for some reason entrusted to Sirius. He’d written a letter to James, which was the last letter he wrote to James, and he’d written a letter to Remus, though he could hardly think about that one now because it was so embarrassing. But he wouldn’t’ve — couldn’t’ve — written those things if he hadn’t been certain he was going to die. 

“I thought you were going to be so different,” Remus said abruptly, “talking to you.” 

“It would’ve been maybe, a couple months ago. It’s coming back. I don’t think it’ll ever come all the way back. I worry sometimes, even if I hadn’t gotten hit, you know, it wouldn’t’ve come all the way back.” 

“It wouldn’t’ve,” Remus said, out the window, “I can tell you.” 

They drove past the intersection with the flooded and pothole-scarred gravel road that would have taken them to their high school but the buildings and fields were hidden beyond the tangled ivy and the hanging moss. 

“It was like night and day those letters,” Remus said. “I kept them but they got lost.” 

“How’d they get — ”

“Everything gets lost. You know that. All my tapes got lost.” 

“I’m sorry.” 

“Don’t be.” 

“Music makes it easier.” 

“Yeah. But you know, we were in the thick of it, from that time — from the beginning of the Tet basically, in the jungle being very quiet. We would find their barracks and they’d just left. Like the beds in the hospital were still warm. We didn’t talk to each other above a whisper at all. Which was probably why it was so difficult. No music. No talking. Every sound becomes like — every sound transforms.” 

So help him even though Hue had been the cesspit of the universe at the time he was there Sirius had preferred it over the jungle. The jungle had about nine million eyes and it was alive. And some of those eyes belonged to other kinds of creatures who could live with this creature not as a parasite but sort of symbiotically, and after a while he realized not all those other kinds of creatures were VC or PAVN, because it was rather easy to become one, and the transformation was undifficult, and it was something you could go through without realizing. It seemed that anyone who had been there for very long became one and after that truly there was no coming out. 

“They got lost at one of those bridges — just one of those bridges way upriver that exists for no reason,” Remus said. “You know those bridges?” 

“Yes, of course.” 

“We got there in the middle of the night. The rockets’ red glare et cetera. Did you ever take acid?” 

“Yeah.” 

“I was so convinced he was going to walk out of the woods.” 

“Who?” 

“You know.”

“Oh — right. Why?” 

“That was like the gate of hell and it would just make sense. Anyway I don’t know what happened. When I sort of came down I was back in the boat and my tapes were gone. I kept the letters with the tapes. So probably some VC has them, because by now probably everyone who was at that bridge is dead.” 

“Probably. That’s fine.” 

“I was trying to save them.” 

“You wanted to — ”

“Yes. I read them every goddamn day.” 

“Did you?” 

“Yes.” 

He didn’t remember much of what he had written in the first one. It had been sent in the first week of February under heavy shelling and he wasn’t certain it would even get to Remus or that Remus was still alive. It had been very florid and he had invoked most of the events he shouldn’t’ve including Reverend Grey and the thing in the car pulled to the side of the road to Crawford and the thing in the car pulled to the side of the road to Arcade and the thing at the plantation house when Sirius’s parents had gone to Marietta for a family reunion and the thing at the Lupin’s shotgun house on the other side of town when Remus’s mother had gone to Atlanta for some spiritual gathering and et cetera et cetera. The second letter had been sort of a retraction and apology which he had written from the hospital in Decatur. It consisted of perhaps six full sentences. 

“Honestly what I thought was that you’d gone insane and walked into the jungle like they say people do. Because you didn’t tell me you got hit.” 

“It didn’t feel relevant.” 

“Fuck you,” Remus said, exhaustedly. “Did you really want to take it back? Do you really take it back?” 

“I don’t even remember what I said.” 

“Fuck you. You god damn liar.” 

“I don’t — ” 

Something darted in front of the car a kind of gaseous shadow in the liquid dusk. What was left of his wartime brain deftly seized control of every other faculty and he slammed in the Buick’s reactive screaming brakes. The seatbelt painfully withheld most of his internal organs and the rest whiplashed. Beside him Remus had braced himself with his wrists against the dashboard. 

The thing had stopped in the middle of the road in the frosted yellow rime of the headlights. It was a big black dog. It was panting and its fur was matted with mud and burrs. Peaceably it sat on its hind legs. 

The radio was playing a song that didn’t exist yet. _I remember how the darkness doubled… I recall lightning struck itself…_

“Do you remember,” Remus said. He was watching the dog unblinkingly. The shadows of the trees and the kudzu out in the crepuscule through the windshield cast his face almost skeletally thin. 

“What?” 

“I said do you remember?” 

“Do I remember what?” 

Remus didn’t say anything. Outside the dog got up and shook itself. 

[ The reflection spidered in the broken mirror. And how proud he was. Some other time he was wearing that skin running along with Remus on the moor not far from the homestead outside Exeter where Remus’s parents were working out their divorce with a solicitor. ]

“That’s me,” he said. 

“Yeah.” 

“How is it — ” 

“That too,” Remus said. His voice was fading out. “You used to say it felt like a rubber glove, putting it on.” 

[ The sun came up and he watched the animal on the floor turn inside out into a boy. ]

“Don’t,” he said, “don’t go now.” 

“I have to, you fucking idiot. If only you hadn’t been such a fucking idiot.” 

He wasn’t even there anymore. Only his voice was there. Then the car wasn’t. Then the road wasn’t then nothing was. 

\--

[ It wasn't his body but almost in which he woke in the smooth black stone box watching at the window and beyond the window the sea and beyond the sea — 

They were watching in the door shaking darkness shaking the bright-black ghost stuff of themselves out like laundry on a clothesline. They were almost translucent and he could count them. Their dry-ice sucking cold was elsewhere. It reached around him. And then they moved on again. 

The sound was the tide breaking on the rocks outside and the toneless raw screaming. He lay in the moving shaft of grey-gold dust light filtered through this gestural eternity of fog. Eventually the memory began to come seeping back from where it had been numbed away unbearably as a rush of burning-bright blood into the emptiness. 

Time moved in the way it did, which was that the color was drained from the window, then it was blown back into the window like dandelion seeds, and then a bowl of colorless porridge and a cup of water were put in through a clanging flap in the door. Outside the tide moved up and down the rock and at its zenith he felt the cool sticky spray on the stiff wind. Outside a gull dropped a crab from a height to crack it but the shell did not break and the waves snatched the tiny red creature back again. 

Two of them came and reached and touched him where he lay on the floor in this body which was his and which was not. For the first time he recalled what they had reminded him of from the first they had glided like black water into the antechamber beyond the docks, which was the moth-eaten violet-black velvet and lace drapery that hung over assorted cursed portraits in the Darkest of the Black family libraries, at Broceliande near Penrith. He closed his eyes. He remembered he had come up on a boat from a town called Fraserburgh. That the old man had been with him at least at first and he had not said a word. The long white beard which blew like a flag in the stiff wind. He remembered that in the window was a letter N drawn in a crude reddish ink. ]


	2. Chapter 2

Eventually he looked up. The fog had set the pool and the gardens in such a thick and opaque fog he could not make out the stone wall nor the foliage that had hung heavily above it since he had been obliged to fire the gardener on suspicion of stealing. The stillness was uncanny and horrifying as though he had trapped himself inside a painting, and the record he had had on in the house must have come to the end of the side. There was a girl or something in the kitchen, he thought he recalled, but he couldn’t remember her name to tell her to flip it, and nor did he really want to go in and flip it himself. His cigarettes were beside him on the fine slate flagstones as was a fifth of bad scotch that was all too nearly empty. He had tossed his pants over the back of the chair so he could tattoo a kind of hideous Gothic castle on his thigh with India ink procured at an incense-reeking store on the Portobello Road, and when he rustled desperately through them he found there was a little baggie of coke left in one of the pockets. There wasn’t even enough left to snort so he wet his finger and dragged it around inside the bag and rubbed his fingertip inside his mouth against his gums. 

He had been listening to Pink Floyd, he recalled suddenly. Remember when you were young… The black ink he’d used for the tattoo had gone spilling over the slate and he sat up and watched it for a while dripping vivid clouds into the pool which stretched in the water like the mushroomish imprint of a nuclear bomb test as rendered in _Life_ magazine. He had a cigarette and rinsed a bit of the scotch around in his mouth and spat it also into the pool. For a moment he contemplated shattering the bottle and slitting his wrists but this seemed overwhelmingly cliche. He thought of how the coroner’s report on Brian Jones’s death had chalked it all up to misadventure. Death as some kind of ultimate misadventure. He had another cigarette. For a moment he thought the best course of action would be to shave his head and sell the house and mortgage whatever other properties he hadn’t been written out of inheritance of and flee for university and eventual eccentric professordom / general hermitage in America. Then he laughed aloud. And then from inside the house someone put on T. Rex’s _The Slider_. 

So maybe the girl in the house was really alright. He turned back toward the sliding glass door into the house, which he had thrown something through and shattered at some point he didn’t remember, but stepping through the empty pane whilst lighting a joint was Remus. Sirius dropped the bottle of scotch in bewilderment or shock, or as a gesture of utter forfeit, and it shattered on the stained flagstones. He had to try a few times to make his voice work. “What’re you doing here.” 

“We drew straws,” Remus said. He wouldn’t quite meet Sirius’s eye. “What incredibly gothic fog.” 

“You drew straws on what?” 

“Who’d go make sure you hadn’t died.” 

Remus took a shoe off and dipped his toe in the pool. Then he sat on the deck and took the other shoe off and started uselessly trying to roll up his trousers which of course were extremely tight around the ankle. 

“Well here you are,” said Sirius. 

Remus put his feet in the water and looked away toward the deep end. He leaned back a little propping himself up by the heels of his hands. “Here I am,” he said, almost to himself. 

Sirius watched the joint atomize against Remus’s lips. He was longing for the days when Remus would have passed it to him without even being asked. But probably even in those days Remus had been having it off with the soundman who they’d asked to play Sirius’s parts since his exile from the band. Six weeks now. “I suppose you want an apology,” Sirius said finally. 

“I don’t want anything,” Remus told him. He leaned forward again and his back cracked. The bones of his spine were pressing up against his jacket. They weren’t quite even and just off-center. He’d had some horrible accident as a child he’d never quite illuminated and Sirius hadn’t really ever bothered to ask him about. Presumably even if he had Remus wouldn’t’ve told him anything. Anyway it had screwed his back up. Once he’d said to Sirius very calmly, “I’m in constant pain.” Though this had been in the thick of it and perhaps he had been referring to the psycho-emotional torture of it all. Indeed at the time Sirius had said something like, me too. Perhaps it had been insensitive. Reasonable people with actual feelings might’ve fought about it. 

“You’re such a bloody good fucking liar.” 

“Yeah?” 

“Yeah, like, I only know you’re lying because I know you.” 

“Do you really.” 

“Like my own soul.” 

Remus took a deep unsteady breath. He pressed the joint out in one of the larger shards of glass from the scotch bottle and put what was left of it in his front shirt pocket. 

“Anyway I’m alive, so you can leave,” Sirius said, not meaning it. Not meaning either part of it. 

It seemed to take a while to filter through Remus’s brain enough for him to fully grasp it. When it did he pulled his legs one by one out of the pool and got to his feet. Not far from where he stood the ink was still dripping into the water. Sirius wanted to pull him close by his belt loops and press his face against his belly and cry about nothing at all. He wondered what Remus would do if he did that. It wasn’t that they never were tender with one another. It was just that it only ever happened accidentally. 

He watched Remus get his shoes on and uncuff the trousers. His hands were trembling just so. Sirius looked past him and watched the drooping peonies at the far end of the yard. He remembered in some halcyon season he had tied them back with twine listening to a Beach Boys record turned up loud from inside the house laughing in tandem with the sunlight… Remus was in the pool extremely fucking stoned. There was no one else around so he’d taken his shirt off which he never did. The spangled light off the water was so bright it basically whited out the horrible scar anyway but Sirius would later lie awake in the upstairs bedroom strewn with clothes and drug paraphernalia utterly unable to sleep, listening to Remus snoring, abstracting this to symbol. 

The petals strewn across the grass. 

“Where are you looking,” Remus said drily. 

“What?” 

“I said, where are you looking?” 

“At the peonies.” He pointed. “There.” 

“Where?” 

“That way. At the fence.” He tried to think where the sun would be if the fog weren't so thick. “There. The west end of the pool.” 

“That’s not the west.” 

“Jesus Christ. Go in the house and get my compass then.” 

Remus laughed in his second most horrible pitch. “You have a compass?” 

“It’s a relic from some or another doomed Arctic mission. I bought it with my cut from the box set if you must know.” 

“Well you don’t need it. It’s north.” 

“Are you — ”

“I am sure. It’s north.” 

“Why the fuck does it matter to you.” 

“I can’t stand the thought of you truly losing your grip on reality.” 

This was almost viscerally shocking. It seemed to be that way for Remus too because rather quickly he crouched to tie his shoes. “Don’t leave,” Sirius told him, “for the love of God. Don’t leave me.” 

“I’ve got to.” 

“Why?” 

“I’ve just — ”

“He’s waiting for you back in Camden isn’t he.” 

“No one’s waiting for me back anywhere, you stupid fuck. You’ve made bloody sure of that.” 

“Have I, then.” 

Remus didn’t say anything. 

“You’ve made bloody sure I’m the one who always ruins everything in your imagination of reality,” Sirius said. “And so I too can’t stand the thought of you losing your own grip.” 

“Fuck off.” 

“I am. I have been. I didn’t need you to — ”

“I’m leaving,” Remus said. 

“Go, then.” 

“I don’t need to listen to you twist — ”

“I thought you said you were leaving.” 

He turned on his heel. The finitude of his boots on the flagstones. In the house the record had come to the end of the side and the needle scratched hypnotically over the playout groove. In the pool the ink had spread out so far it seemed gone now. And his thigh where he’d pressed the marks in under the skin was starting to hurt. 

He watched the peonies at the end of the yard. The fog moving serpentine tendrils in the trees. The petals were so heavy with the thick dew he watched them droop incrementally closer to the grass. 

[ North. ]

\-- 

Sometime he remembered when he was. The stale old cocaine feeling rocked him from the gut upward like a kind of demonic possession. The flat soft light coming in the canvas seemed very old. As though it had passed through several centuries in space before it reached this place. The bundle of furs present in the tent with him appeared after some investigation to be Remus. Ice crystals had sharpened and congealed in his eyelashes like tiny glass sculptures. 

Outside it was snowing just so and gathering with a delicacy upon the permafrost. James was out there tending to the fire and with all his furs and the funny goggles on (they all wore them occasionally against snowblindness though they didn’t seem to do an ounce of good) he looked every bit like one of the Inuit they had parlayed with in Greenland years previous. “What time is it,” Sirius said, for some reason. 

“There’s no time here.” James laughed. He lifted the glasses onto his forehead. “What is it? Do you have an appointment?” 

“Fuck off. I can’t be curious — ” 

“There’s no time for curiosity about English things that work the English way,” said James. He had thick enough leather gloves on to reach into the fire and select an ember for his pipe, which he subsequently offered to Sirius. “Listen, I’ve decided what it is we must do.” 

He sat down beside James and passed the pipe back. “What’s that?”

“Forget time,” James said. “Forget history. This is after all some entirely different animal. Have you looked at it? The entire world is blank. We’ve gone — perhaps somewhere in the fog — ” 

“James — ”

“ — to some other — sphere.” He took a jolly sort of puff on the pipe exacerbated by how spectacular his beard had gotten and how hoary with the blown ice. “There could’ve been a door.” 

“A door?” 

“This isn’t the place we know.” 

“Have you gone mad?” 

“One must put one’s world in order by the use of certain context clues,” James said. “I would say you’ve gone mad if you think you’ll get anywhere considering that the same structures and-or truths remain self-evident in — ”

At first Sirius thought perhaps he couldn’t go on. He was watching up at the sky in which nothing moved. The reflection in his eyes which were nearly fully black with cocaine was a darkish cloud like blood. 

“ — in locales so alien and circumstances so extenuating,” James finished. “This can’t be bent to our will. So truthfully I don’t know why we’ve even come here.” 

This latter bit Sirius couldn’t help but agree with. “Some men aren’t content for there to be mystery.” 

“Spoilsports. The lot of them.” 

Sirius would have used a rather unkinder word. 

“The trick is just going to be convincing him,” James went on. 

“Who?” 

“The old man. And also — ” He indicated the tent in which Remus was sleeping. It was a subject Sirius did not dare broach any further. Remus was a scientist who collected plant fossils from the snow and the sharp rocky escarpments and carried them with him in his pack despite Dumbledore’s careful counsel against added weight. He then studied said plant fossils carefully by lanternlight and sketched them in his notebooks. He had done this meticulously even as it had become more and more clear the trouble they were in perhaps warranted a disruption of routine. Sirius understood he would not necessarily take kindly to any such metaphysical admonition from James. Besides he and Remus had been sleeping together out of the kind of nihilistic decadence that manifests when one’s freezing death is almost certain, and Sirius didn’t think it was something James needed to know about. 

“The old man is — ”

“He doesn’t know when to let well enough alone,” said James. He rooted around in the fire for another ember. “This is the last of the tobacco so it’s quite lucky you woke up, innit.” 

There was a storm coming in from the north. Sirius could tell this because they had set up the old man’s tent to the north of the site when they had arrived there in case they were obliged to make their way back to the coast in whiteout conditions and could not rely on landmarks. Inside it the lanternglow by which the old man wrote cast a soft butter light into the crystalline snow. 

The north. 

Funny to think how desperate and striving they were now for the north after how many dead on account that they had come here in the first place to strive desperately south. South to the end of south. As though there would be a bore there driven through the world. 

The north — the window — 

“Just reset your brain,” James said, but he sounded very far away now. “Like if you were a child. Like if this was all you had ever known. Not simpler, really — but perhaps certain things don’t matter as much as you’d thought. If all that matters now really is living.” 

\--

[ “Keep the past like — in a box. Put it away.” 

It was near the end of August and Lily had gone in the house to put the baby to bed. They were out in the backyard drinking beers and the wards around the house and the grounds were buzzing like a porchlight beset by suicidal moths. 

“It can’t be how it was. It just can’t. It won’t ever be. I don’t know why we had to live at this time. But there’s no use trying to fight it now. And really if we lived at any other time I’m certain it’d be like this. Was like this — will be like this.” 

“Have you been doing peyote,” Sirius asked him. 

“No, because Lily would be so jealous. I think she would prefer that I cheat than that I have a psychedelic experience without her.” 

You can leave the kid with me and Remus, Sirius almost said. But this was no longer true because Remus had moved out of their Gravesend flat for parts unknown at the beginning of the summer. They had broached suspicions with Dumbledore, who had warned them that perhaps they should take precautions to have as little contact with Remus as was possible. James and Lily had taken this to heart but would condescend for very public gatherings in locales like the Brighton Pier or Portobello Road so as to prevent suspicion. Sirius had settled for frantic sex in neutral locations which usually meant seedy hourly-rate hotels with bedbugs and cockroaches in which the beds creaked and the faucets dripped arrhythmically and the windows didn't fully close. He quite simply couldn’t be bothered to care about this or anything. Another function of the apocalypse decadence of this figurative death row. 

“Lock it up,” James said. “Don’t expect it back.” 

“He might’ve prepared us better.” 

“Yeah. He might’ve. So much might’ve been done better. But it wasn’t. Here we are.” 

It seemed James had processed the whole thing by forcing himself to be very zen as though he had learned from some long illustrious life he hadn’t lived that fate couldn’t be fought. Sirius had processed the whole thing by pretending time didn’t move at all and this was some sort of transient nightmare which would imminently be solved. Remus had uncovered from this same set of clues a sort of inkling that he had been among the unlucky and/or sainted cohort selected to eternally suffer. 

As for the other one — it had no face. No one else seemed to notice that it had no face. And yet it was the least of his worries then, as it had perpetually been the least of his worries, which of course was the crux of the problem. 

“I can’t — I don’t know how much longer. It’s eating me up.” 

“It won’t be much longer,” James said. “I know it.” 

“How?” 

“It can’t go on. It’s — what’s that line, vexed to nightmare…” 

“What line?” 

“Muggle poetry, idiot. Nevermind.” 

There was a lightning bug circling over the overgrown peonies toward the picket fence that marked the north edge of the property and the wards. The fallen petals were a bright soft white in the moonlight against the dark dew-damp grass. ] 

\--

[ Blood in the window was his own blood in the window. It was odd that he would’ve cared so much about the letter N in the window. Odd that he would’ve cared so much about anything at all really. 

He must’ve come back to being human by accident while he slept. After a while he remembered he could put the dog on so he did. It was easier to think like this though his brain could move in fewer directions. 

He must’ve remembered it when they brought him in with the old man on the boat from Fraserburgh into the lantern-lit anteroom where they’d taken his clothes and cut his hair. Then they had come into the doorway like some manifest wrath of snakes. A swarm of black fog. He would’ve clung to the vaguely grounding concept that the window in the cell faced the north. But they did not leave the doorway of it for some untold and untelling amount of time because there had been so much to take. And there would always be so much to take unless he could imagine some altogether more permanent way to inscribe it… 

He waited until they checked in the door again and then he took the dog off and sat as close as he could manage to the window in the cold where the modicum of fresh air stirred the cobwebs from his mind. That evening he began the exhaustive process of silently, wandlessly transfiguring his own blood shed painstakingly into a little well in the floor into pitch black ink. ]


	3. Chapter 3

The only other Englishman on the lot was an editor named Lupin who worked on the action flicks in a suite full of smoke toward the back of the property. Sirius hated going to see the editors because the little rooms smelled like battery acid and the impending-inferno stench of the rush-running 35mm tape in the Moviola and anyway he was supposed to leave production and post alone because they were completely outside the terms of his contract as a producer and the fixer had been very clear upon his hiring that he was not an auteur and that moving parts worked symphonically in a well-oiled ebb and flow like a factory assembly line, at least on this particular lot, at least at this particular studio. But in this instance they had to make relatively severe cuts in post once production had wrapped, after an intervention from inspectors under the Hays Code, which left Sirius to go and see the editor who was the only other Englishman on the lot, because nobody else wanted to. 

“Suite Five,” the fixer said, “nine AM, he’ll expect you.” 

It was already hot at nine AM and Sirius was exceedingly hungover. The editing suites were in these strange lofted rooms connected by catwalks from which people fell drunk on occasion and not long ago they had nearly burnt to the ground when one of the editors had fallen asleep or (more likely) overdosed on barbiturates and dropped her cigarette in a tumbler of straight gin. She had been working on _Double Indemnity_. 

Inside Suite Five Sirius could hear the Moviola machine whirring. There was cigarette smoke seeping out the window, which was ajar, though a black curtain had been tacked over it from inside. He rapped thrice upon the door and stepped back careful on the narrow gangway. The edge of the sun alone was visible around the corrugated ridge of the roofline. 

When the editor opened the door smoke spilled out almost comically like the encroaching sea in a pirate drama. He was dressed all in grey and in the murky light even his skin was grey. He wore unfashionable glasses and his haircut was bad and the strange light from the Moviola projector cast shadows and blue-greens against his face like a topographic map. There was a cigarette loose and sticking between his lips which were the most striking thing about his face. Inside the tiny room on a folding table cast in the intimate light of the projector was a tumbler of some amber liquor and an overflowing ashtray. 

“Brown, was it?” 

His voice around the cigarette was soft and very tired. There was more than a bit of Somerset in the accent. 

“Black — with _Finest Glory_.” 

“Right. Yes, they told me to expect you. Come in.” He turned back toward the machine. “Code violation is it.” 

“Yes. I’ve got the paperwork with me.” 

The editor was obliged to move two rumpled suit jackets, a tie, a bottle of pills, a sweater, and a novel off a chair so Sirius could sit down. He threw everything into a corner where there rested similar items heaped sinisterly in the shadow. Then he said, “Let’s see the paperwork.” 

Sirius produced it from his bag and the editor put on his desk light so he could read it. In the dark room the brightness was shocking. The walls were undecorated and stained with smoke. There was a bottle of bourbon in the windowsill and a stack of cases containing reels of film spilling out from under the desk. At Sirius’s feet was the case containing the first rough cut of _Finest Glory_ , which he’d watched himself for the first time at a special screening three days previous with the inspector who had had concerns. 

“Fine,” said the editor. He passed the paperwork back to Sirius. “I thought that might be a problem.” 

Nevermind he himself had cut the movie with all the objectionable pieces fully intact. “The inspector wants to cut that scene entirely,” Sirius said. “Of course the director has concerns about that as he feels it’s the emotional core of the film et cetera et cetera.” 

“We can mess with it. It’s just that scene?” 

“Well I mean, you saw it.” 

The editor dragged the case containing the film out from under Sirius’s chair with the back of his boot. “If Hitchcock could make _Rope_ …” 

Sirius had never watched an editor work before. In the dim ring of the desk light and the shadow tracing on the floor through the tightly drawn blinds he loaded the tape into the Moviola (the scene in question was midway through the second reel) and threaded it through all the loops and clips and spindles and mirrors. Then he sat in his faded smoke-stained wheeling chair which creaked and switched off the desk lamp. “Bourbon?” 

“It’s nine AM.” 

“Is it?” 

Sirius didn’t say anything. 

“Want a cigarette then?” 

“Sure.” 

It turned out they were in one of the jackets the editor had thrown across the room to make room for Sirius to sit. Once they had been fetched and lit and the editor had refreshed his tumbler of bourbon the machine was switched on and the film advanced at speed to the scene in question by means of the editor’s toe like a seamstress’s on the foot pedal. Together they watched the action move forward comically quickly on the tiny screen in silence but for the whirring. The editor ashed his cigarette in his tumbler of bourbon but seemed not to notice when he took a sip of it. “Coming up,” said Sirius, recognizing the scenery. Though _Finest Glory_ took place in the French trenches at the end of the First World War the exterior shots had been filmed predominately in Iowa on the first assistant camera’s uncle’s farm. The rest of it had been done on a soundstage toward the back of the lot. 

The editor pushed his glasses up his nose as he exhaled a shocking quantity of smoke. The flick of a switch with his cigarette hand slowed the film back to its customary speed. The scene had been set in an Alsatian trench where the protagonist, Captain Dirk Smith (played by the studio’s current resident heartthrob Caradoc Dearborn in what the fixer had privately told Sirius was a role conceptualized as a pivot into true leading man territory), bid a tearful farewell to his mortally wounded radio operator and dearest friend from back home in Ohio, Private Alan Gently. The fixer had also told Sirius privately that he was banking on a Best Supporting Actor nod for Benji Fenwick in this role as a career-salvaging coup after the actor had been photographed at drug rehab in Calabasas attempting to quietly detox from the cocktail of uppers and downers with which he had chemically managed his own career since he was a teenager. It was as yet unclear how successful this attempt had been. 

The editor adjusted the volume dial and the dialogue kicked in — 

“ — those beautiful nurses waiting back behind the lines, Alan,” Dearborn was saying gruffly. 

“There isn’t time. Command just — ” 

Fenwick inhaled laboriously. The molasses-y substance they used to imitate blood in the black-and-white pictures bloomed into his white shirt. 

“ — they just radioed. You’ve got to go over the top. It’s the only way.” 

“I won’t leave you.” 

“You’ve got to — don’t you see. Dirk.” Fenwick was a remarkable actor or perhaps he was hardly acting at all. His eyes were bright and hungry with grief. The camera moved in to show his hand (spattered with more molasses) alight birdlike on the shoulder of Dearborn’s finely pressed wool uniform. “It’s the only way,” he whispered. 

Dearborn on the other hand acted as though the craft were a sledgehammer being used to burst through a wall. “It can’t be!” Damningly, he stroked Fenwick’s curly fringe from his forehead with a manly hand. At least a third of this whole debacle, Sirius was realizing, was the fault of the camera operator, who had evidently decided he would treat this scene as he might treat a kiss in any other picture. Another third of course was the fault of the editor, who was watching the action on the projector with his brow furrowed in inscrutable concentration, and who had chosen to use the entire take unbroken as though he were Ziegler or something. “It can't be,” said Dearborn again, softening his voice. The aforementioned manly hand pressed over Fenwick’s “wound,” soliciting an even more damning gasp of pain. 

“It’s over for me,” Fenwick said. “But it isn’t over for — for the fightin’ 44th — ” 

He coughed painfully. For his part, Dearborn let out a relatively convincing sob. 

“You’ve got to,” said Fenwick gently. “It’s bigger than us. It’s bigger than — than Ohio — bigger even than America. You’ve got the chance to stop evil in its tracks, Dirk. Promise me…” 

He broke off into a fit of coughing. “Anything, Alan,” said Dearborn tearfully. He had begun to stroke Fenwick’s hair again. “I’ll promise anything…” 

“Promise me you’ll never stop,” Fenwick whispered. He had gripped the lapels of Dearborn’s uniform in weak fists. A thick tear slipped over his cheekbone and his jaw. “Never stop fighting for, for everything good and beautiful about the world…” 

“I promise… I promise.” 

_I love you_ , Sirius thought, was unsaid, wouldn’t’ve been irrelevant. Something hurt under his ribs. The scene ended with Fenwick’s peaceful and angelic death, after which Dearborn pressed his forehead to his friend's chest and sobbed manfully. The editor stopped the tape when the shot cut to an exterior shot of the trenches. He ashed the black ember of his cigarette in his bourbon again. Sirius cleared his throat. “The DP told me they filmed two different angles,” he said, “if you’ve got the tape.” 

“Yeah, under the desk.” 

Sirius went digging for the other reels while the editor reversed the film to the start of the scene. But eventually he joined Sirius under the desk. “There should be b-roll too.” 

“B-roll?” 

“I don’t think — well of course the other angles are pretty tight…” 

“Jesus.” 

“I think we can salvage it with some cuts, get the voiceover on top of the b-roll, and it won’t look quite, so, you know, tender.” 

“Alright.” 

They unearthed the alternate cuts and the b-roll and dragged everything out from under the desk. The editor loaded the reel with the b-roll into the Moviola opposite the reel that held the middle third of the rough cut. “You don’t have to stick around,” he said. 

“I’ve got to bring whatever you cut to the fixer by noon.” 

“Well what time is it?” 

It struck Sirius that the editor was like one of those strange tubular sponges or blind fishes living at the warm water vents at the bottom of the sea. Quite simply there was no way for him to know what time of day it was. It was very likely he had been up all night drinking bourbon and smoking cigarettes and perhaps he thought it was almost time for happy hour at the Alhambra. “Just after nine AM,” Sirius said. 

“Right,” said the editor. He was winding the tape of b-roll through the clips and spindles and Sirius watched his hands. He’d put his nth still-burning cigarette in the ashtray while he did it but there were yellowy nicotine stains between the first two fingers on his left hand. He flicked a switch to cast light through another prism and the blank second screen showed a smudgy black-and-white image of an explosion throwing the rich red-earth clods of the Iowa farm against a dense gray sky. 

“How long have you been doing this?” Sirius asked. 

“Since ’46.” 

“You just make it look so easy.” 

“Practice, you know, like any machine…” 

He sat again in the creaking wheeling chair and picked the cigarette up and attached it to his bottom lip. Then with both hands and a foot on the pedal he set about advancing both reels of film, watching the rough cut projected on one screen and the b-roll in another, seemingly one screen with each eye.

“What did you think of the picture?” Sirius asked. 

“I found it a charming film. But rather inaccurate to the experience of war.”

“How would you know?” 

“I was in Burma.” 

“We had troops in Burma?” 

“Indeed yes. That’s why they call it the Forgotten Army.” 

“Well what did you do there?” 

“Fought the Japanese,” said the editor. “What else.” 

Occasionally with incredible delicacy and precision he would stand up and mark places on each reel with a grease pencil in esoteric symbols Sirius couldn’t grasp. When he had gone through the ten-minute reel of b-roll and the two reels of alternative angles with this in mind he set about cutting pieces of conversation out of the rough cut with scissors and glueing in assorted explosions, as though the whole thing were a strange puzzle. 

“You’ll have to talk to sound,” said the editor softly, not looking up, “I’m sure they have just stock explosion sounds, and someone’ll have to mix it…” 

Sirius in fact had an appointment with sound at eleven-thirty. “Got it.” 

It was ten-thirty by Sirius’s wristwatch by the time the editor had cobbled together a new cut of the scene. They watched it again together in the projector of the Moviola. The tender dialogue cut into the b-roll like Sirius’s mother’s maid had once cut butter into flour to make a rough pie crust. “Promise me,” Fenwick whispered, over a dramatic slow-motion shot of shouting soldiers charging over the top of a muddy trench, “promise me you’ll never stop fighting for everything good and beautiful about the world…” 

At the end of it the editor reversed the tape again to the middle of the scene to look over a problem section. “What it says now,” he said, in a kind of sharp unfamiliar tone, “is more accurate to the experience, I mean the experience of war, which is that people can feel a certain way about each other only when they’re under constant threat of death. Which means it’s going to say that men need war to love each other. Do you think the director — ” 

“ — do you really think so?” 

“What?” 

“I said do you really think so?” 

The editor didn’t say anything for a while. He reversed the reel and moved it forward again and again over the same four-second loop of Dearborn and Fenwick gazing dazedly into one another’s eyes. Finally he said, “I cut it how I cut it, didn’t I?” 

“I guess you did.” 

He let the tape play through. “I mean this version’ll be just fine for your inspector,” he said. 

“I wish it didn’t have to be.” 

“Yes, so do I. So does everyone at this studio I don't doubt.” 

Stop abstracting all this, Sirius almost said. For god’s sake make it real… 

In another fifteen minutes they had a cut they were satisfied with and the editor carefully unraveled the tape from the machine and packaged it up in its tin box for Sirius to take to sound and then to the fixer. They went out together onto the gangplank that connected the suites, squinting in the light. That thing was still hurting under Sirius’s ribs when he shook the editor’s hand, and he noticed for the first time the scattered freckles under the editor’s red-rimmed eyes, so he did something stupid. “Are you doing — well are you up to anything tonight?” 

“What?” 

“I said are you busy tonight. I’d like to see you again.” 

The editor’s mouth shaped several attempts at words. Like a gasping fish. Finally he said, “It’s just I have to cut this silly noir by Friday.” 

“It’s Monday.” 

“Is it?” 

“Is that enough time?” 

“Yes, yes, more than enough.” 

“Well do you like jazz?” 

“I guess so.” 

“Want to meet me at this place tonight? The Cauldron Club on Sunset Boulevard. Maybe eight PM.” 

“Yeah, alright.” 

“Don’t lose track of time,” Sirius warned him. Then he went off to see about the sound. When he looked back up at the gangplank the editor was still standing out there finishing his cigarette, but he was looking up toward the sky and the far-off hazy hills. 

\--

At the Cauldron Club at eight PM the editor was sitting at the bar reading the paper with his forehead resting in the palm of his hand. At some juncture he had changed his shirt; it had evidently once been a fine pressed white and might’ve passed for it in the thin shadowy light had Sirius not formerly been a colorist. He wondered if the editor had scrounged it from the pile of clothing in the corner of the suite. The bartender had supplied him with an ashtray in which he had executed already at least three cigarettes. 

“Bourbon?” Sirius asked, leaning against the bar beside him. 

The editor looked up and behind his glasses his eyes seemed to focus like a camera lens. “Sure. How’d they like the cut?” 

“Just fine. How’s the noir?” 

“It’s silly, it’s just unbearably silly…” 

“So is it a comedy?” 

“No…” 

The bartender brought the two bourbons and then Sirius and the editor brought them and the ashtray over to the dark corner booth Sirius frequented when he came to the Cauldron Club, whether alone or with someone he was intending on seducing. The club was uncrowded and onstage a few musicians were setting up unhurriedly. 

“Tell me about Burma,” Sirius said. 

The editor turned to him with an eyebrow cocked most of the way up his forehead. Into the ashtray he extinguished the fourth cigarette. “I’m sure you’ve seen and heard enough war stories.” 

“Yes, but. Not yours.” 

“It’s not interesting.” 

“Who says?” 

The editor went for his cigarette case but seemed to think better of it. Instead he ran a finger around the rim of his tumbler of bourbon in a way he might not have understood was suggestive. “You weren't in the war,” he asked, “were you?”

“Tangentially,” Sirius told him. “I was a colorist for the BBC.” 

The editor nodded sagely. “Ah.” 

“We didn’t really cover much of the Pacific theater,” Sirius told him apologetically. “I guess that was on American TV.” 

“Maybe some of it. We were commonwealth troops basically. Not that many regiments even from merry old England — mostly India, actually… So there really were no cameras. There are barely any photographs.” 

“How long were you there?” 

“Forty-three to forty-five. Before that I was in Africa but no action really.” 

“You were there until the end of the war?” 

“Almost. Had some, ah — but let’s not talk about it.” 

It was painfully tantalizing. “Are you sure?” 

“Yes, very sure.” 

“Well then what do you want to talk about?” Sirius asked, aware this sounded petulant and rather pathetic. 

“Perhaps we should just complain about our jobs as coworkers do,” said the editor. “For example this is the fourth picture of Albus’s that I’ve had to cut again because of a code violation.” 

Albus was the director, who considered himself an auteur and a maverick at the studio though neither of these could really be proven. Sirius too resented working with him but according to rumor most of the other directors were even more insufferable. “You should tell the fixer you don’t want to work with him again,” he told the editor. 

“The problem is he got me this job so I can’t really say no.” 

“How’d he get you the — ”

He was fixed with a look that suggested this too was off the table. “Well that’s like me and the fixer,” said Sirius. “I’ve known him for years. So I can’t really say no to him either.” 

“What kinds of things does he have you do?” 

“Usually this sort.” 

“Taking editors out for drinks or — ”

“No — I mean fixing things up for the execs behind the directors’ backs. I’ve never taken anyone from work out like this before. Well I mean — I’ve taken James and his girl out but — ” 

“Right.” 

“You know what I mean.” 

The editor nodded. He was already halfway done with his bourbon and yet perplexingly he was beginning to look rather less tired. For the first time Sirius allowed himself to wonder if they would sleep together, and as such if the state of his flat (which it seemed he saw twice a week if that) befit bringing home a person he was trying to impress. Usually Sirius came to clubs like this to meet men and exchange the sorts of secret behaviors and coded statements that indicated varying sorts of interest. This didn’t seem like a language the editor spoke. And yet he had agreed to a night out. 

He elected on a new strategy. “I have some gossip that might interest you,” he said. 

The editor’s eyebrow cocked further dragging the corner of his mouth up with it. “Do you really.” 

“You can’t repeat this,” Sirius told him. “Fenwick told me privately he’s in love.” 

“With Dearborn? Heaven forbid.” 

“Yes. That’s what I said. I mean Fenwick’s been in this business since he was a child. His understanding of the meaning of affection is no doubt skewed. But evidently they’ve, ah, consummated it.” 

The editor sat back in the booth. In the subterranean golden light he didn’t appear so much grey anymore as burnished — like a dusty relic from a tomb. Perhaps it was the bourbon or the conversation but Sirius could not tear his eyes from the soft pale bow of the editor’s mouth which moved a little now not so much in a smile but in something perhaps resembling it. “So it isn’t one-sided then.” 

“Evidently not. I haven’t spoken to Dearborn about it.” 

“I was going to say it didn’t look so one-sided in the film. Dearborn is more uncertain. But no less — you know, floundering, the way love is a sort of floundering.” 

“Lovely. You should be a screenwriter.” 

“Nothing I wrote would ever pass the code. Never. No amount of editing would do it.” 

“You’d have to write from other than your own life. Maybe then — ”

“I couldn’t do that. I just absolutely couldn’t.” 

“Well I don’t know if you could either because evidently you don’t talk about it.” 

The editor smiled and it transformed his face. Onstage across the room a trumpet player tuned up with perfectly cinematic timing. “Touché,” said the editor. 

“What about, tell me about it like a screenplay.” 

“Get me another drink. Then maybe.” 

“You’ll have to do better than maybe if I’m buying you another,” said Sirius. But he was already up and out of his seat. 

“Fine. Top shelf then.” 

“Fine.” 

At first Sirius thought he was angry. He felt vibrating. The bartender refilled the glasses and when Sirius picked them up he could see the tremors in his hands in the amber liquid. He went back to the booth where the editor cleared his throat dramatically. “In the first act our hero is in Cairo pushing paper,” he said. “Gleeful montage of women singing in flapper gear in jazz clubs and walking home in the wet streets as the muezzin leads the call to prayer at dawn…” 

“Everyone loves a good Egyptian liaison,” agreed Sirius. 

“It’s rather-short lived and the whole thing’s got vaseline smeared over the lens or whatnot — like a dream. Completely unreal to think war could be like that, is the lesson, because at the end of the first act, we follow the hero to India, and then to Assam…” 

“Then what?” 

“I don’t know. I’m not a screenwriter. Probably lots of scenes like the ones at the end of _Finest Glory_ but more jungle. More rot and malaria and things. The Japanese cut off the supply lines so they brought supplies in to us by air. The planes like cutting through the fog over the water. And boxes falling from the sky into the water and the trees. Fighting all the time, taking turns sleeping, you know, they never stopped, so we couldn’t stop, couldn’t lose the foothold, like the tiny slipping foothold.” 

“What about act three?” 

“Well at the end of act two, the hero has, what did they call it, Combat Stress Reaction… you could dramatize it however you want. I did some foolish things. Basically I tried — here’s where the code would kick in on you. Well not the only place but, I tried to, um, off myself. More than once. Not really like I was the only one either.” 

“But then — ” 

“I got evacuated and sent all over the Pacific in the end of July 1945. They had, you know, drugs drugs drugs. Then I got to California on August 3. So the first thing I remember being in this country is, in this psychiatric hospital over the sea, in Oxnard actually, watching the news on August 6 — ” 

“Dear god.” 

“Yes, well, he certainly wasn’t there, that day or really any day, if he’s ever been anywhere.” 

“And then what?” 

“Albus came location scouting in October. He used the hospital in _Decline and Fall of a Chorus Girl_. Did you see that picture?” 

“Yes — that’s where you were? I thought it was a set.” 

“Yes well, it was quite Gothic, quite eerily Gothic for California I always thought. This place is very new. It pretends to be otherwise but it’s quite transparent. I don’t know if any Americans really notice.” 

“So what happens in the end?” 

“In the end Albus hired me to work with the grip team when they shot the scenes there and then I suppose he liked me. He got me in the door for a job as assistant to an editor. So she taught me everything she knew and then I started to do it by myself. That’s what happened.” 

“But the last scene — what’s the last scene?” 

“I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s happened yet.” 

“Hypothetically, I mean.” 

The editor thought for a moment, watching the musicians on the stage. There were freckles in the shell of his ear, the tip of which was blushing red with drink and a little embarrassment. “I like it when a movie ends on the beach,” he said thoughtfully. 

“Alright. I like it. But what does it say — what’s the message?” 

“I don’t know. War is idiotic. And your mind can only take so much abuse. And this industry is in its own cold war because this nation can’t decide on whether its moral system should include the right to happiness for all people. But perhaps it has no real message. Just that a human life usually seems like an absurd farce, which is a necessary if quite painful truth that too few films reflect.”

Sirius felt stunned, or perhaps just drunk. Under the table he pressed the toe of his shoe against the editor’s. 

“I think perhaps films should be more abstract. Impressionistic. Which is what is — well one can have relatively little craft as an editor when one’s source material is so restrictive and prescribed. But it’s what I’d like to do.” He grimaced across the table probably thinking it was a semblance of a smile. “I’ve said so much too much to you.” 

“You haven’t, you haven’t at all.” 

“You should tell me about yourself now. Just — please.” 

Sirius reached under the table and touched the knee of the editor’s grey wool trousers. After a moment the editor’s fingers laced with his. They were very cold. “Let’s to go the beach,” he said. “We can talk in the car.” 

“The beach.” 

“Yes, yes, every film should end on the beach, like you said…” 

The editor hailed a cab in the street whilst Sirius paid the bar tab. The driver took Wilshire Boulevard through the neon-lit night city to Santa Monica. They took their shoes off and walked down to the water in the cold sand. The beach was deserted under the high white wedge of the moon. Far off on the water a few lights were visible from barges and pleasure craft that moved in the night. 

“I thought I might jump into the water and just swim,” the editor said. “Just until I couldn’t. Or maybe to somewhere, I don’t know. But I didn’t — you know logically we looked at the maps every day. We knew exactly where we were. But it didn’t seem like it was really on this earth. So I thought, if I swim I’m just going to find the wall and then there’ll be no going back. The trick is they get you to believe there’s no world without war and indeed, I mean here now, there isn’t. Every bloody movie I edit. You would think we’d never learned anything at all.” 

“We haven’t. I don’t think we have at all. Sometimes I don’t think our species is capable of any kind of — any kind of passage of knowledge, really, though you’d think we would be… I mean we got a fear of snakes and things…” 

“But not of war. Yes.” 

“Because it’s, there’s a class who fights and a class who sends them to fight. It’s always been that way.” 

The editor drew a cross with his toe in the sand. He was smiling a little down at his folded arms. “Are you a communist or what.” 

“Probably we shouldn’t talk about that.” 

“Probably we shouldn’t do any of this really. Like probably you shouldn’t come home with me.” 

Sirius’s gut jolted. “I thought you lived in your edit studio.” 

“Sometimes I forget that I don’t, you know…” 

To the north the coast and the highway bent to the west. Beyond that Sirius knew the channel islands were invisible beyond the haze and the curve of the earth over the sea. Beyond that was nothing and then nothing — 

“Promise me something,” Remus said. 

[ _Do you know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember nothing?_ ] 

It was slipping away. “Anything,” Sirius said, grasping, “anything…” 

“You have to remember just this one thing, from this.” 

“What is it?” 

Only his voice and the water and the waves crushing crashing down all that was left of the dream. 

“Swim that way.” 

“What way?” 

“That way. This way. West.” 

[ West. ] 

\--

[ His finger dipped into the puddle in the groove in the floor came out black. And beside it he had sharpened on some forgotten occasion the handle of a porridge spoon into a needle-thin point. 

When he could feel them coming he put the dog on so they couldn’t take the important things. So perhaps it took him days to tap the ink under his skin with the point of the spoon. ]


	4. Chapter 4

After a while the dream came back. He sat up. Remus was at the table looking out the smudgy window onto the street. Outside it was raining. 

“Alright, Moony?” 

Remus pressed his thumb into the corner of his eye and didn’t say anything. Sirius got up. His legs wobbled under him a little. There wasn’t much left but there was nothing else to do. All the works were on the table and the needles in a pink depression glass mug of rubbing alcohol. Remus upon his arrival had pushed the whole setup bodily away from himself as though it were a meal which disgusted him. 

“Do you want a hit?” 

“ _No_ , Sirius.” 

“Suit yourself.” 

They both watched it bubble like toffee caramel in the spoon. The expression on Remus’s face was one of completely piteous longing. He dragged his gaze away and back out the window again as though he were pulling apart two very powerful magnets with every ounce of strength he possessed. 

“It won’t,” Sirius lied, “you know, just one.” 

“I can’t.” 

“Are you sure? There’s enough — ”

“ _I can’t._ ” He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Sirius, I have to tell you something.” 

“Well can it wait?” 

“I don’t know if it can.” 

His eyes were red from being pressed. He had lost weight withdrawing and it was coming slowly and differently back to him. He reached across the table very careful around all the implements and he touched the back of Sirius’s hand. Then he seemed to think better of it. 

\--

Sirius had been taking pain pills he purchased from a neighbor who had been injured in one of the factories before it was closed. These he purchased with funds gleaned from stealing and pawning his mother’s jewelry, which she never seemed to notice through her perpetual Valium haze. Anyway it was jewelry she hadn’t worn since before Sirius’s brother was born when the Blacks had had a better reputation and social standing. The shuttering of the textile factory that Sirius’s great-great-great-grandfather had founded nearly two centuries previous meant the family was essentially surviving off a trust managed out of a bank in Durham. By the time Sirius was sixteen so little of the family assets were liquid that sometimes they went to bed hungry. The great house decaying in its moldy opulence faced the Town Moor and Sirius would look out in the night from the window in his garrett bedroom at the lights moving and shifting in the great green cricket-rubbing darkness as though they were the ectoplasmic luminations of a secretive coven of of supernatural beasts drawing feckless explorers to certain doom. Then he would climb out the window down the trellis and wander down the block in the earsplitting silence to see Mr. Dumbledore, who would carefully count out five or six oxycodone pills in exchange for a wad of pawn-shop cash. 

He had gotten a taste for this stuff first at age fourteen when his brother had had serious pneumonia and had nearly died. While he was recovering the doctors had prescribed morphine pills which were to be administered twice daily to counter the pain in his lungs; this responsibility fell to Sirius, as did most responsibilities relating to Regulus’s health and eventually most other aspects of his care and feeding. Eventually, seeing the effect on his brother, he himself had tried one, and then he had gone to his room and laid down in the bed. He had felt, intimately, everything that had ever ailed him dissolve like melting butter in a hot pan. And after that he figured there was nothing else to do. He understood by the time he came of age there would be no money to inherit. At public school, now that the Blacks could no longer afford tuition at even the most questionable private academies, they hadn’t even bothered showing them any career options aside from the navy. He had a recurring nightmare that he ended up as his brother’s full-time nurse in a squalid bedsit where they spent all day every day eating beans on toast and watching increasingly dire news on the telly and eventually developed their own incomprehensible language and at last killed each other in an argument over cigarettes. 

After school he and his classmates would walk around the derelict houses down in Elswick mucking up their uniforms and jumping out of second-story windows onto piles of stained and reeking mattresses found in dumpsters. It was abundantly obvious that they weren’t really friends, and each considered one another little more than a means to an end. Most of their parents were out of work and by the time they were fifteen they had figured out how to give each other and themselves crude spotty tattoos with sewing needles and ink emptied out of a ballpoint pen into a water bottle cap. A girl Sirius had met a few times died after a botched abortion. And then one evening in the summer Mr. Dumbledore didn’t have any oxycodone pills. Instead he had a square of tinfoil in which he had folded up flakes of amber resin. 

“What’s this?” 

“It’s the same but different,” said Mr. Dumbledore. 

Sirius put the tinfoil square in his wallet and after school the next day he went down to Elswick by himself. Weeks previous he had recognized a black boy with oversize spectacles who had dropped out of his school about a year earlier sitting outside one of the derelict houses. On this particular evening he was there again. “Black,” he said when he saw Sirius, “innit?” 

“Yeah.” 

They shook hands. The other boy was trying to make himself seem very businesslike. “Potter,” he said, straightening his lapels, “James Potter.” 

“Lovely to um, make your acquaintance…” 

Potter led him in the house through the door, which was hanging off its hinges. Beer cans rolled down the long hall toward the back porch on which several figures were sitting. The shattered remnants of seemingly every window on the first floor had been trampled into the thick dusty carpet like sequins in a garment. Someone somewhere was listening to “Revolution 9.” 

“What can I help you with,” said Potter conspiratorially, “you know, uppers, downers…” 

“It’s — someone gave me something. I’ve no idea what to do with it.” 

He took the tinfoil square out of his wallet and showed it to Potter. As though he were some Mafioso testing the quality of a block of cocaine Potter wet the tip of his smallest finger and tested some of the fine amber substance against his tongue. He looked up at Sirius with an eyebrow raised. “Where’d you get this?” 

“My neighbor. He’s been selling me oxys since ’76.” 

Potter ushered him upstairs with a guiding hand between his shoulders. “Moony will show you what to do,” he said. 

\--

James would later tell him he had been turned on to heroin by a school chum on a drunken evening on the town moor. This chum ended up dying under the bridge by ’85 with some respiratory infection caused by dirty needles. Lily had started taking it with a girl friend who had had an older boyfriend who drove up on Fridays from Middlesbrough. For Remus it had involved some breed of coercion which was never precisely defined. Still others, whose faces and names he could only grasp on select occasions when the wind blew right, cited family troubles, sporting accidents, peer pressure on the rave scene, et cetera. Sirius had simply been bored. It seemed as good a reason as any. 

They took the train to Cumbria in the summer and wandered together in the vales and slept at night under a blue tarp strung by rope through the trees in the cold misty hollows. Sometimes he felt they were the final four survivors of a starship crew abandoned on a foreign planet inhabited by formless alien creatures who had mastered humanoid impersonation. Other times they fought so viciously he wondered if they had not all been born with some vital germ of kindness simply missing from their brains or rather if it had been bred out of them by adversity. They shifted their shape. The world that went onward on the telly in the news and the soaps was the realm of the geographically charmed. On the sinking seeming island that was the north-east there was absolutely nothing to do but wait. But he wasn’t sure what for. 

It came back to the beginning in his imagination and in dreams. Occasionally he recalled they hadn’t wanted this for him. But they had been the only ones who hadn’t, when the deed was done. 

\--

This was the person listening to “Revolution 9.” It was a schoolboy Sirius had never seen before. His uniform was filthy and unrecognizable and the trousers were torn at the knees and cuffs and there was ash and dirt smudged on his face artfully as a rugby player’s greasepaint. He was sitting against the wall in a featureless room whose walls were peeling blue paint in curls and the afternoon light through the spiderwebbed window was moving across his face. This light or something else appeared to have dazed him, contributing to a general diffuse mien that suggested he was not entirely of any place nor time but particularly not this one. There was a hole in the sole of his shoe. And scattered around him like a saint’s relics were the seemingly random implements Sirius would later understand to be the works necessary to prepare a dose of heroin for intravenous injection. 

“Moony,” said Potter. The eyes moved slowly. “This is Black.” 

“How do you do,” said Sirius. 

A spindly white hand was reached out for him as though from the void. Sirius took it and found the grasp stronger than he had expected. “Very well,” said Moony, “thank you.” 

“He’s got a dose he wants your help with,” Potter said. 

“You don’t like injecting yourself?” 

“I’ve never tried before,” Sirius confessed. 

Moony’s eyes moved quicker this time from Sirius to Potter, who shrugged. “I’ll leave you to it,” he said. He went back out into the hallway, and then his footsteps seemed very loud on the stairs. 

Sirius went and sat cross-legged beside Moony on the floor. Downstairs the back porch door creaked open and slammed shut, and someone laughed. Then someone screamed. “I won’t shoot you up for the first time,” Moony said. 

“It’s not — I have had it before. Pills — oxycodone.” 

“It’s different.” 

“How so is it different?” 

“It just is.” 

Moony had cleared a space about a foot square of refuse and rags and old magazines and had set up his things there like an altar on the stained hardwoods. Sirius took the tinfoil square back out from his wallet and set it down beside the lighter and the gummy spoon. “I don’t know if there’s enough for both of us,” he said. “But we can split it if there is. If you help me.” 

Already Moony had leant forward and picked up the tinfoil and unfolded it. He shifted the amber flakes with the ragged nail of his smallest finger as though he were reading them like tea leaves. Then he folded it back up again. “I’ll trade you,” he said. 

“What?” 

From inside his wool sweater (he had picked or cut his school’s logo off the breast of it, because there was a ring of darker-hued fabric there) he produced an orange pharmacist’s bottle containing fifteen or twenty pills. This he pressed into Sirius’s hand. 

“It isn’t oxy,” he said, “it’s hydrocodone. It’s German or something, I don’t know.” 

According to the sticker on the bottle the pills had been prescribed to someone named Fenrir Greyback. “Where’d you get them?” Sirius asked. 

Moony ignored that. “Take one with me and see if you like it.” 

“What about that stuff?” 

“Leave it to me.” 

He must have put the tinfoil in his pocket or hid it somewhere already because it had disappeared. Sirius opened the orange bottle and shook two pills out. He put one on his tongue and held the other out to Moony. He didn’t swallow until he saw Moony had swallowed his. Then he waited. The sun moved on the floor. Slowly it picked him up off the ground and laid him out somewhere higher. He floated. When he came out of it he was alone in the room and it was dark outside. Moony had put a blanket over him which smelled like old sweat and ash and woodsmoke. He felt his way downstairs in the moonlight through the shattered windows and found in the back they had started a bonfire in an oil drum which breathed sparks and light up into the sharp darkness. 

\--

They were at war, he sometimes conceptualized; at war with god, who had abandoned them, to whom they sent occasional missives; they were at war with Westminster and London, with Mrs. Thatcher and the Queen and her parliament and their stuffy halls, with their local MPs, with their palaces; they were at war with history, they fought history tooth and nail in their dreams; they were at war with each other, but it was a war of love, mostly, or otherwise it was a war over scarcity of goods and presumed slights relating to said scarcity of goods; they were at war with their parents and their siblings, with their old friends, with their old teachers when they saw them in the supermarket whilst attempting to shoplift dinner; they were at war with everyone else in Newcastle (and indeed in the T&W, Northumberland, Durham, and the northernmost reaches of North Yorkshire) who had chosen opiates as remedy for Thatcherism, again over said scarcity of goods, and/or the control (presumed or actual) over the movement of said goods by certain parties claiming sovereignty over their trade; they were at war with the police, who seemed to them representatives of a social order that had abandoned this (physical and metaphysical) place utterly; and most violently they were at war with themselves, because it seemed a twice-daily atavistic clash within each of their very souls whether this was life or death, whether they were living or dying, and if they might rather live or die. 

\--

The next time he saw Remus was two months later at the Elswick house on a Tuesday night. By this time he had finished the bottle of Fenrir Greyback’s hydrocodone and had acquired more heroin from Mr. Dumbledore. With this he had sought out the cadre of junkies who lived under the rail bridge over the Tyne, who had been less discerning with regard to whom they inducted into their ranks. They had also rolled Sirius for all he was worth while he was out, which was a necklace of his mother’s he’d intended to pawn and eight pounds and sixpence. Rather quickly he found this, as nothing, really mattered. 

He went back to the house in a mild air of vengeance. At some juncture they had gotten Indian takeout which littered the counters in the kitchen and they had polished off a few 40-oz bottles of malt liquor which rolled in the hallway. They were all out back again having a bonfire in the oil drum. Potter saw him first and embraced him. He introduced Sirius to his girl or so he claimed, whose name was Lily and who didn’t seem much like his or anyone’s girl. She had a joint the size of her thumb between two fingers and this she offered to Sirius. 

“You’re very beautiful,” she said. She was extremely stoned. “You look like — lost in a garden. But you know this.” 

“I guess.” 

“What’s your sign?” 

“Scorpio.” 

She laughed. Beside her one of her friends started laughing and then the other ones did in grand cacophony until eventually everyone on the entire porch was laughing just at the sound of laughter. Sirius passed the joint back to her. His ears were burning. “Is Moony here?” 

“Who?” 

“Moony, the schoolboy, you know, with the skag — ”

“Remus. Yeah, he’s just there.” 

He was on the other side of the torn-up lot sitting on the ground being talked at by some other of Potter’s friends. At the time he must’ve been sixteen. It was unclear, and indeed would never be entirely clear, how long he had been taking drugs or what had started it. James would later make it apparent he thought Remus was a brilliant mystic with an air of tragedy, in the vein of any number of saints who had sought ecstasy at whatever cost. Later Sirius would learn that Remus had run away not six months before their first meeting from a Catholic school in Leeds. He liked music and James Joyce. There was a bit of West Country in his accent but this was rarely addressed. They never spoke about where they had come from or where they were going. After all it seemed obvious that both precedent and antecedent were nowhere, and that this too was nowhere. It was all a landmined no-place bombed and razor-wired to hell by a previous generation’s adherence to philosophy as yet unproven to do much besides line certain already well-lined coffers. One born nowhere and living nowhere and walking only nowhere blinded by the blowing dust might as well self-medicate; though the wound wasn’t technically visible, also it was all around; also it was one’s whole body, it was the city and the moor, it was one’s mind, it was one’s parents and siblings and all one’s friends. It was an inheritable wound endemic now to the species or at least to the class, eg. perhaps the species. The worst thing about it was that it didn’t really hurt. It just was. 

A less-discussed side effect of taking heroin, Sirius had realized, was that when one did the only thing one could think about was heroin. 

He went around the fire and crouched beside Remus. He was sat on a slab of concrete with his arms around his knees. At some juncture he had acquired a pair of jeans but they were too big and in poor shape not much better than the school trousers had been. And he still had the shoes on with the hole in the sole. Potter’s other friend, whose face and voice and name Sirius could never really remember, was talking at him about David Bowie. 

“ — don’t get all the bisexual talk, at the end of the day.” 

“What’s not to get,” said Remus drily. 

“Just, why — it should be about the music, man…” 

“You don’t think any musicians should talk about their personal lives?” 

“No — it’s just — ” 

He looked to Sirius desperately. The static where the face might’ve been buzzed like a faulty TV signal and Sirius shrugged. “I really like ‘Ashes to Ashes,’” he said. 

“Great song,” said this guy. Remus’s mouth twisted. He was looking toward the fire fixedly. The guy seemed to realize he was outnumbered. “Want a beer?” he asked. 

“Cheers,” said Sirius. He sat down when the guy up and left. He opened his mouth to say something but Remus stopped him. 

“You did, huh.” 

“Yeah.” 

“Well well.” 

“You had to have known — ” 

“No. I thought maybe you were smart.” 

“I’m not.” He swallowed. “I was thinking maybe you would want to…” 

“I just have pills,” Remus said. 

“I have some. Maybe we could together?” 

This was the thrust of the vengeance, though he wasn’t even sure what precisely it was vengeance for. Remus was looking like he was going to say no but of course he wouldn’t, because he couldn’t. They went inside and upstairs together in the darkness. In the blue room at the top of the stairs Remus took all of his works out of the old tin lunchbox where he kept them, which he had hidden in the piles of abandoned clothing. Also under there was a camping lantern which he lit with a sulfurous match. In the deep golden light he seemed much older and very tired. He put his hand out and for a moment Sirius wasn’t sure what for. Then he realized, and he put the tinfoil square from his wallet in it. 

“Where are you getting this?” Remus asked. 

“The old man who lives down the street from my parents, if you can believe it.” 

“Oh. Albus Dumbledore?” 

“How do you know him?” 

Remus didn’t answer. He was laying out the things from the tin lunchbox on the floor in the flickering light. 

“Want to listen to music?” Sirius asked. “Do you like Television?” 

“The band?” 

“Of course.” 

“Sure.” 

“I was listening to ‘Marquee Moon.’ My favorite song.” 

He had his Walkman with him with the cassette in it. He was obliged to rewind it to the beginning of the track and then he started it from the beginning. He'd always thought the guitar sounded like church bells might in a parallel universe. Something about it was hypnotic and almost worshipful. 

Remus had the stuff in the spoon with his lighter held under it and the crackle of it melting seemed to resonate against the sound of the music. “My favorite too,” he said. 

“Really?” 

“I don’t like _Adventure_ so much. I mean, it’s okay. There’s that one song, track three — ”

“‘Foxhole.’ _Soldier boy stands at full salute_ …” 

“Yeah, that one.” 

“I’ll bring it next time.” 

“Cheers. I’ve only heard it you know on the funny console at the record store on Westmorland. But they kicked me out before it was over.” 

“That’s cruel.” 

“Yeah, well, I looked a mess, was high, you know, and they have to get the schoolgirls in after class to buy Duran Duran records…” He drew up the orange-amber liquid inside the spoon into a needle with a practiced care. Then he held it up against the light from the camping lantern. “Whoever showed you told you, right, check for air bubbles…” 

“Why in hell would they’ve said that.” 

“‘cause it can kill you,” Remus said lightly. 

“Oh.” 

Remus laughed or something. A single horrible punctuating sound. “Oh,” he said mockingly. 

It seems absurd, Sirius might’ve said. He watched Remus take off his jumper. He was very thin in the darkness. The marks inside his elbows were like long scratches — as though he or someone else had clawed the skin there until it bled. Freckles, scars. One or two of the spotty sewing-needle tattoos inscribed into the fluorescent grey skin like some atavistic message conveyed in untranslatable runes. Remus passed him the latex strap from the floor which he tied around his upper arm. The end of it in his teeth. Then the needle in his hand. It was warm from the molten stuff inside it and from Remus holding it. 

It seems absurd, he might’ve said, that you would care about dying, you would worry about dying, that you would be careful to keep from dying, what with all this, this stuff, death stuff but good, like those chemicals your brain releases in the end; it seems ridiculous that you would care about dying, isn't dying the fucking point? 

Whatever, just royally whatever. He did not even feel the pinch of the needle breaking his skin in anticipation of what was to come. His blood dispersant through the thick impure liquid like a drop of sunset. 

_I remember how the darkness doubled — I recall lightning struck itself — I was listening to the rain — I was hearing something else —_

\--

Life seemed short. 

The agony of all bliss, etc., that it would soon be over. It was never not sunset, or August. There was never more than one dose left. There was never more than Ovaltine powder and stale biscuits in the cupboards. There was never hot water. There was never anything to read. There was never anything on telly. It was never not raining, except for a second’s flash of sun splitting things open like the eye of god. 

There were never batteries in his walkman. There was never more than a few shillings left of the dole check. There was never any sound. There was never anything to do. But it had been like this even before. 

They went walking down by the abandoned factories sometimes to meet dealers. Down there people lived in damp sodden squats much like theirs whose bleakness was exacerbated by the industrial surroundings. He remembered going out onto the bustling floors as a child with his mother and father. The air thick and heavy with cotton shards and the machines screaming. All the men and women with their bowed heads, hands darting quickly around the shocking percussive speed of the spindles. 

[ He lay in the moving shaft of grey light. ] Across the room someone was crying and Lily embraced her. In the dark her red hair was like a powerful beacon flashing across the sucking drain of dusk. 

[ He wanted to tattoo himself with all their names but couldn’t remember them. ] 

\--

In a month’s time Sirius woke up on the floor of the blue bedroom with Remus’s school jumper folded into a pillow under his head. Remus himself was out on the back porch having a cigarette and listening to _Loaded_ by the Velvet Underground. Out back they shared a day-old soggy chip butty which Remus had unearthed in the kitchen and shared Sirius's last cigarette between them. Then they took the bus up to Jesmond to go to Mr. Dumbledore’s to score. On the way Remus waited on the stoop of the Black family townhouse whilst Sirius went inside to collect select necessaries and kiss his mother on the cheek. His brother was doing schoolwork and eyed him suspiciously around his bedroom door which was ajar; Sirius pretended he didn’t notice. 

On the stoop out front Remus was picking his fingernails and trying to make himself seem very small. Most of the substance to him was only in the filthy clothes which made him appear a kind of sympathetic vagabond. That they were obviously the wreckage of a Catholic school uniform had its own sinister effect. “You grew up here?” he asked. 

“Yeah. All my life.” 

“Fucking hell.” 

At the townhouse down the way Mr. Dumbledore was in the kitchen boiling eggs. He invited Sirius and Remus to sit down in the living room and offered them lagers and a sleeve of stale digestive biscuits. He referred to them collectively as “boys” and regaled them with tales of football heroism from school, many of which Sirius had heard before. The radio played the Jam’s “That’s Entertainment,” in Sirius’s opinion the saddest pop song ever to grace the BBC. 

“I am glad you boys have become friends,” said Mr. Dumbledore, tending to the eggs. Remus was looking around at the portraits on the dark dry-rotting walls which were collecting a thick grey grave-dust and bore the likenesses of some of the most hideous people Sirius had ever seen. “In my day,” Mr. Dumbledore went on, “we would say, always have a trip sitter…” 

“Did you drop a lot of acid?” 

“Oh yes, you know, I was at Barbecue 67, and the 14-Hour Technicolor Dream; I was there when Jagger and Richards were arrested at the UFO Club… but it was rather a different time, boys.” 

“I’ve never done it,” Remus said. “I’m petrified actually.” 

Mr. Dumbledore sat down beside them in his smoke-stained armchair with a hardboiled egg in a little patterned ceramic egg cup and set about lighting one of the sweet clove cigarettes whose odor had permeated the entire house. “I thought you in particular might’ve tried, son.” 

“No, never. I’ve no interest.” 

“It doesn’t feel quite as good — in fact I might posit it doesn't feel good at all… quite simply it isn’t the point of it, to feel good…” 

Sirius had had a bad trip about six months previous he didn’t dare bring up for fear of opening some floodgate. He thought he knew exactly why Remus wasn’t interested in LSD, based on a number of inferences he had made about Remus’s history and personality based solely on hints, conjecture, and his own reservations which he assumed applied. Together they half-listened to Mr. Dumbledore’s tales of trips gone by until Sirius, anxious and itchy, asked for the time and said he had an appointment. 

Mr. Dumbledore laughed. “With whom?” 

He thought quickly. “With the school guidance counselor.” 

Remus looked down at his hands which he had folded politely in his lap. His lip quirked. He knew Sirius hadn’t gone to school for about a month now. 

Mr. Dumbledore kept the drugs under his armchair in an old tin lunchbox rather like the one in the Elswick house in which Remus kept his works. From this box he doled out enough junk to last a week between them. Money was pooled from their pockets. The notes Remus presented were folded tight as Chinese fans and questionably damp. They went back out together into the heavy blue velvet crush of evening and walked back to the bus station to go home to Elswick. Sirius’s blood felt singing with anticipation, but singing like Diamanda Galas. He imagined he could hear Remus’s heartbeat and a song that didn’t exist yet. “Do you think he really did all that stuff,” Remus asked. 

“I don’t know. He’s lived in that house as long as I can remember. He was the night manager at a coal processing plant on the river ’til it closed.” 

Remus watched out the window at the color shifting out of the sky. Sometimes he just looked like a schoolboy. “My da had a test pressing of _Led Zeppelin_ ,” he said kind of wonderingly. “Never asked him why or how he got it.” 

“Did he listen to it a lot?” 

“No.” 

“Where are your parents — ”

“Exeter,” Remus said. “I haven’t seen them.” 

It was likely they did not know at the time that he had left the Catholic school in Leeds, as he had forged a rather convincing letter from his mother telling the headmaster he had come home to care for a dying aunt. But Sirius didn’t find out about this for another year or so. 

Back at the house they went upstairs into the blue room. “Let me do it this time,” Sirius said. 

“What?” 

“I said — you always cook it and all that. I can do it. You should put music on.” 

Remus watched him for a minute. He seemed loathe to relinquish this modicum of control over the proceedings. But finally he said, “Alright.” He rifled distractedly through his pile of tapes. Eventually he put on his own copy of _Marquee Moon_ , this time from the beginning. It served to compound the inescapable feeling that time was but a loop of days or hours presided over by the whims of the drug. 

“Nice,” Sirius said. 

Remus was watching the junk bubble in the spoon with the a familiar suffocating longing with which he usually regarded the process as he performed it. Sirius had never seen it angled in his direction before. “Yeah,” Remus said. 

“I can remember hearing this for the first time. Stoned in my room. Like, you could put your whole consciousness inside it and — ”

“Air bubbles,” Remus reminded him. There was something harried in his voice. “Be careful.” 

“I am being careful.” 

He drew it up into the syringe and passed it to Remus, kind of wondering why he was being so gentlemanly. Let me do it, he almost said again, yearning for it in a shocking way, let me do it for you… Instead he bit his tongue and watched. Something about watching felt almost unbearably intimate but, he reminded himself, Remus had watched him at least a dozen times now. There was a tight drawn furrow of concentration and hunger in Remus’s brow and eyes. He tightened the rubber tourniquet and rubbed the vein inside his elbow out with his thumb as though this were whatever assembly line job he performed hundreds of times each day. When the needle broke his skin the vivid cochineal blood bloomed in disastrous nuclear cloud inside the syringe before it drained along with every drop of liquid at last into the vein again. Then his face collapsed like one of the old mill buildings on the south bank under demolition — percussive, draining. Dust blew out from it. It all fell down to rubble and then there wasn’t anything there but a kind of manifest emptiness. 

Sirius got up and went to his side and untied the rubber strap from around his upper arm. He could feel his own heart beating in his fingers. Remus smelled like Mr. Dumbledore’s house (clove smoke) and dust and sweat and something vaguely medical. His skin was warm and his mouth was just open and held the soft shallow breath in it as some crucible. 

_How’s a snake — get outta skin_ — Tom Verlaine was singing on the cassette player. 

It had fucked with him so much already he couldn’t tell what the yearning was for. It had both fists around the pit of his stomach and twisted like a wet cloth. He took the needle from Remus’s limp hand and cleaned the point of it in rubbing alcohol and then he cooked up his own dose in the spoon. 

\--

Sometimes he remembered he had been an unhappy and jealous child prone to supernatural paranoia. His brother had been ill. He was convinced there were ghosts or monsters in the closet and the attic and under the bed just watching. He lay awake listening to his father arguing on the phone with the eldest of the Black family patriarchs, who had retired to the estate near Penrith which would be sold in five years’ time, and which Sirius would later learn had been foreclosed upon. He listened to the BBC and to Beatles cassettes in headphones. Downstairs over dinner they sat at opposite ends of very long tables and listened to a vinyl record of the London Symphony Orchestra performing Chopin, which was worn out and crackly by the time Sirius was a teenager. Once or twice he had been obliged to fetch the doctor for his brother in the middle of a meal. 

Occasionally he found himself seized with the impression it had all happened to somebody else. Like his entire life had been a very slow tear-jerking art film before this delicious void had opened up at his feet and he had leapt into it gladly. 

\--

Remus was nowhere to be found which happened sometimes, so Sirius went to Mr. Dumbledore’s alone. His brother was on the stoop in his school uniform smoking a cigarette, looking like some French dandy. “He’s not here,” Regulus said. 

“You shouldn’t be smoking,” Sirius reminded him. “You have asthma.” 

“Oh fuck off, junkie.” 

“You fuck off.” 

Once they would have settled this with some pathetic fisticuffs. Instead Sirius sat beside his brother on the stoop. There was a little genial silence before Regulus said, “Well do you know anybody else then?” 

“Fucking hell, there’s no way — ”

“Just Oxys. You sanctimonious fuck. You stole enough of mine back in the day. You bloody owe me.” 

Sirius glared at him. But anyway the tide was going out and he was going to have to go see Fletcher anyway, and if he did that Regulus would just follow him. So he said, “Come on.” 

They walked together to the bus stop. Regulus wouldn’t even bum him a cigarette. “Where are you living?” he asked. 

“Down in Elswick. Are you still — ”

“With mam and da, yeah. Mam actually — well she went off. Just for a little bit you know like she used to.” 

“Huh.”

“She won’t talk about you. She blacked your name out on that hideous tapestry.” 

Sirius was rather proud to hear this. “Did she.” 

“Right before she left, yeah.” 

They took the bus in silence all the way down to the river. It was the tight, uncomfortable sort of silence which indicated the tide was going out on Regulus as well. When they got off the bus the rain had started coming down in sheets. They ran together through the silent charcoal-gray warzone of collapsing blighted factories to the squat where Fletcher could customarily be found, but the cavernous room was empty except for Fenwick, who was sitting stoically as a yogi on his filthy mattress, cooking up a dose. Sirius’s entire being jolted and yearned. “Where’s Fletch gone,” he gasped out, choking back bile, drenched to the bone and shivering. 

“It’s great to see you boys too,” said Fenwick. “He’s gone up to the church. You could wait for him.” 

Sirius kicked the wall. “God damn it.” Regulus ran a shaky hand through his soaked hair. “Have you got anything, Benj.” 

“Depends on what you want.” 

“Pills,” Sirius said, at the same time Regulus said, “Whatever.” 

“No pills,” said Fenwick. “Skag and, um, some coke round here somewhere…” 

“I’ll split that with you,” Regulus said, “that shot.” 

“You said you weren’t — ”

“Fuck off, Si.” 

“Well we can share it three — ”

“Hardly enough for three,” said Fenwick absentmindedly, drawing the stuff up into a syringe. 

“I’ve got — ” Regulus checked his pockets. “Five pounds.” 

“What about you, Sirius,” Fenwick asked. There was a pissy smile playing about his mouth now he’d identified this as a money-making opportunity. It was playing around Regulus’s too nevermind if he could’ve managed to wait for Fletcher he’d’ve probably been able to buy a week’s worth of junk for five pounds. But saving money seemed like a complete nonissue at this tantalizing juncture even for Sirius. And, of course, even after checking in every fold of his wallet and in the lining of his jacket where coins slipped sometimes he found he had on his person precisely two pounds sixpence. 

“God fucking damn it,” he said. Vindicated, Regulus practically waltzed across the room to join Fenwick on the disgusting mattress. “Cunts,” Sirius said. 

“This is all I bloody got you jealous madman!” Fenwick cried. It echoed in the long cold room. 

“Whatever happened to our — months of friendship — ” 

“Your brother’s doubled your bloody offer you bloody idiot! Go find Fletcher. He just got something in — heaven knows where…” 

Sirius turned and stormed out, kicking the wall again on his way for good measure. The tide was so far out on him now the twinge of pain in his toe seemed to radiate through all his bones especially the spine and at last the skull. He was hardly out of the building and back into the rain by the time he had convinced himself half that dose of Fenwick’s had been rightfully his and he had been thwarted by his brother, who had only ever thwarted him in all his pursuits in all the time they had been alive together. 

He walked at speed up the river and across the Scotswood Road thinking so loudly he eventually realized he was talking to himself. After a while he was obliged to duck behind a topiary to vomit. A tired-looking woman smoking a cigarette on the stoop of an estate watched him with a bored scrutiny as he stumbled by. 

The church was a decaying and ascetic brick monolith dyed slate-gray with rain and smog. It was sat on an overgrown lot at the corner of three different blighted council estates. It had been abandoned most of Sirius’s life and populated primarily by junkies as long as he’d been aware of such a thing. It seemed rather a death trap on a account of the fact it was caving in, and James had warned him against the kind of unsavory characters who held court there. “Worse than the folks under the bridge,” in fact, James had said. But these concerns seemed trivial in the face of the rapidly mounting nausea. He was halfway up the stairs when the door opened; he startled, but it was only Fletcher. Past him was a sort of hellmouth of darkness which breathed the smell of smoke and unwashed bodies and wet brick and old death. And, arm slung over Fletcher’s shoulder, feet dragging (missing one shoe), utterly dead to the world, was Remus. 

“Alright, Black,” said Fletcher. His thick Geordie accent was nearly incomprehensible to most people, even Sirius, who had one too. 

“Yeah — sick but — Fenwick said you might — anyway is he alright?” 

The church door slammed shut behind Fletcher with the low percussive bass tone of the tomb. Sirius took the rest of the steps two by two and got Remus’s other arm over his shoulder. His head lolled showing the long pale line of his neck and the vivid purpling bite-bruise at the base of it inside the stretched-out collar of his navy t-shirt. Sirius could not identify the precise source of the lightning strike of jealousy that cut focused and white-hot as a laser through his spinal cord into his roiling stomach. 

“He’ll be alright,” said Fletcher, who had been selling skag and things since the mid-sixties, claimed to have once smoked heroin with John Lennon circa “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” and had certainly witnessed enough fatal overdoses to know what one looked like. Still Sirius noted the precarious future tense of this reassurance, but didn’t address it. Together they half-dragged Remus down the steps of the church and across the neighborhood toward the house, keeping to the shadowed alleys (amidst the rubbish and rubble and blight, discarded needles, a little girl’s rusted pink bicycle) in attempt to avoid the police, who tended to circle the neighborhood judgmentally. On the corner of their street Remus twitched and muttered a little and attempted valiantly but with almost no strength to withdraw his left wrist from Sirius’s grip. “There he is,” Fletcher announced. Recognizing key indicators Sirius stepped back just in time to dodge the surge of vile yellow acid Remus vomited into a plot of dead hydrangeas. “Atta boy,” said Fletcher. 

They dragged him weakly protesting into the house. James and Lily were in the front room floating on air together and could not even be bothered to look in the direction of the door when Sirius and Fletcher slammed through it with Remus between them. They dragged him down the tight cluttered hallway into the kitchen and let him down rather ungently on the filthy tile floor. Sirius, head and gut spinning horribly in different speeds and opposing directions, dumped half the contents of the rubbish bin out into the cabinet under the sink and deposited the bin vaguely close to Remus’s head in case he threw up again. Then he said, “Well Fletch, I don’t suppose — ” 

“Of course son. What do you need?” 

“Literally anything.” 

Fletcher began to rifle with a truly incredible attitude of leisure through the numerous interior pockets of his stinking wool carpet coat. “Have a bit of junk I think,” he said pleasantly. 

“Whatever you can give me for — ” Sirius dug in his pockets, already having forgotten the sum he had counted out less than an hour before. “Two pounds sixpence.” 

“Fine,” said Fletcher. He had located the square of tightly folded tinfoil which he had sought. At the sight of it Sirius nearly fell to his knees like a mutinied desert cartographer having stumbled upon an oasis. “Get your works,” Fletcher went on, “I’ll push off with you.” 

Sirius ran up the stairs two by two, but he had to take a break at the top, because his vision had turned black. In the blue bedroom he uncovered the army-green tin lunchbox of Remus’s works and with this he ran back downstairs taking these also two by two. In the kitchen Fletcher had helped Remus sit up against the wall. His dark eyelashes fluttered against the fever-pale face. Sirius thought of the soft inside fan of a mushroom. “Who lives there at the church,” he asked, passing Fletcher the lunchbox. 

“Dealer called Greyback.” So that was where Remus had gotten the hydrocodone pills. “Lost boys,” Fletcher went on absently. He was emptying the amber flakes inside the fold of tinfoil carefully into the old silver spoon from Remus’s lunchbox. Sirius sat down close enough beside him on the floor to watch while he prepared the dose. His heart had started to flutter around in his throat. “They act like some bloody cult,” Fletcher said. 

“How so?” 

“Why don’t you ask Moony about it?” 

This made Sirius laugh, because it was so completely absurd that he might ask Remus about this or anything, or that such interrogation might lead Remus to tell him anything at all besides to fuck off. Eventually he realized he couldn't stop laughing. As though the brakes on the machinery of it had been cut and he was barreling downhill in the night toward the edge of the bluff like the last scene in _Quadrophenia._

“What’s so bloody funny,” said Fletcher. 

“Well he isn’t too forthcoming is he.” 

At this as if on queue Remus coughed and swiped a hand blindly across his face as though to clear some residual birth liquid from his nose and eyes. “There he is,” said Fletcher again. “Right on time.” 

Remus opened one eye and saw what they were doing and closed it again. His head lolled back against the kitchen wall with a decisive, defeated thunk. 

“Too bad you done shot enough to kill a horse,” Fletcher went on. 

“Fletch,” Remus said. Not so much saying as his mouth moved and there was just enough breath inside him to make the words. “Just a little.” 

“It’ll kill you, even just a little,” said Fletcher jovially. 

“Sirius,” said the not-voice. “Come on.” 

“Just ignore him, son.” 

Sirius could rather easily because there was only enough in the spoon for two doses anyway and he thought probably it would kill him to not have any while it was staring him in the face like this. 

“Fucking,” Remus tried, “you — fucking Judases — ”

“He still got that Catholic schoolboy about him doesn’t he,” Fletcher laughed. 

“Yeah, he’s tried to shake it and it won’t go.” 

“Well some things don’t go do they…” 

Fletcher held the syringe up to the light and checked the amber liquid inside for bubbles. Across the room Remus had fought one eye open to watch them with a yearning jealousy through the haze of his comedown. “For you, son,” said Fletcher, passing Sirius the needle. God help him but he could’ve cried. 

The prints of Remus’s fucking teeth in that rubber rope. The breath sound in the room hammering hammering hammering his ears and the heart beating braying blood through the vein showing under skin blue white and red some abstract tearing Union Jack pulled taught on a stiff breeze he felt at last the delightful shocking bite of the point of it then everything nothing at once like a disaster of wind and light rushing into a white room — 

Far off and away across the universe and the cold tile pressed against his forehead Remus watched him through the pearls that were his eyes. 

\--

He thought sometimes he had memories inside other lives. The drug turned him into stardust and transmuted him through spacetime into another’s unenviable veins who moved and spoke the same and had the same glaring flaws and regrettable attachments. There was one who was sitting on the floor in a pitch-dark and possessed prison on the sea tattooing himself with nonsense, but there was also one who rode a Lambretta around Brighton listening to the Who’s “Baba O’Riley” on tinny radio broadcast… there was one on the beach at Dunkirk and one on the beach at Normandy and one on the beach at Iwo Jima and Inchon and Da Nang; there was one in the ships at Mylae; there was one smoking opium in Paris and another in London and another in Bruges and another in St. Petersburg and another in New York and another in Los Angeles; there was one riding around West Texas utterly lovestruck and doomed, and there was one robbing trains in Canada, there was one mining silver in Colorado, there was one trapped for thirteen standard years aboard a spacecraft en route to colonize worlds past all reckoning; they were all stood up against some nameless evil he couldn’t see or even fully fathom sometimes, but he knew it was there, and sometimes he was certain it was only death, and other times (bad times) he understood it was a violation of death not unlike that he himself performed every time he tried to sedate himself enough to touch it and reneged at the last upon the contract. 

The others who were with him sometimes had the same shape and sound of laughter. They were not altogether entirely remembered, and some he remembered in higher definition than others. Sometimes it was just the suggestion of their faces in the silvery darkness. He would come to on the kitchen floor feeling with incredible certainty he had to tell Lily something, or James something, or Remus something — a fragment of a dream with a haunting and possessing significance. But anyway by the time they had come around he had forgotten what it was. 

\--

He woke up on the kitchen floor. It was just past midnight and Fletcher was gone. Outside it was raining again. At some juncture Remus had gotten up and got himself a glass of water and a blanket and washed his face but he had come back to hover over Sirius like the angel of death. “I’ll never forgive you,” he said. There was not much or anything at all left to his voice. Un-voice. 

Sirius groaned and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Whatever,” he said eventually, but by that time Remus had left the room. 

There were some people out on the back porch listening to _London Calling_ and sharing a sixer of Carlsberg. Sirius went out there for a minute but there was no beer left so he went upstairs to the blue room, incredibly awake, wondering about about his next fix. He had no money so it remained to be seen where it would come from. In the blue room Remus was reading _Finnegans Wake_ by the wavering light of the little camping lantern. His hand was shaking a little in the onionskin pages. “I haven’t got anything,” he said, not looking up. 

“I know you haven’t. Want to go up to Mr. Dumbledore’s with me tomorrow?” 

“I haven’t any money either.” 

“Well neither have I. We’ll have to hope he’ll give us something on credit. Or else sexual favors.” 

“Jesus. No.” 

“Not even for — ”

“ _No._ ” 

“Wouldn’t paint you as one with standards.” 

Remus looked up. There was something ugly twisting in his face even beyond the peaked look that signified the turning point between a very long comedown and withdrawal. “Fuck off,” he said. “Get out of my room.” 

“This isn’t your room. This is a collective where we own everything as a commons.” 

“Sirius, we don’t own anything.” 

“That’s what I mean.” 

He sat on the floor in the corner and pulled one of the blankets over himself. At first he tried to sleep but he couldn’t, so he stared out the window. He was thinking with relative concern about his brother, whose self-destructive impulses he had been aware of since their childhood. Usually heroin was the soothing balm he applied liberally over his tendency to be subsumed by familial worry but anyway now there was none. And anyway now there was more reason to worry, though he was dimly aware it was hypocritical to be fearful regarding one’s brother’s drug use when one was using the same sorts of drugs. He thought about what he might say next they saw each other: _if you leave me alone with our parents I will kill you._

He didn’t sleep, but Remus did, and they collected themselves around ten. They had no change even for the bus to Jesmond and so they were obliged to make the hour’s trek in the fine sideways rain on foot. Sirius had thought he might ask Remus about the church but he decided against it practically as soon as he opened his mouth, when Remus fixed him with an expression connoting extreme suffering. 

Sirius had not yet been on a bender so severe but he would establish his own den of iniquity for this purpose not far into the future, after assorted predictable disasters. Afterward it was like all one’s limbs were full of sand. It took a great deal of focus and concentration mustered into the scattered fragments of one’s mind, which felt soft and achy as a rotten tooth, in order to motivate oneself to do anything besides lie on the floor and wait for another dose. It was like realizing you were in a quicksand which was death with just your mouth above the surface of it. 

Instead of speaking he watched around at the city and the way the rain stained the monuments of red brick and flagstone. They walked close together against the wind and leaned into each other when they were obliged to wait to cross the street. Remus was shivering and not with cold. Around the corner from Mr. Dumbledore’s Sirius realized he was clenching his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering. 

Inside the house Mr. Dumbledore was boiling eggs again. There was a roaring fire in the hearth which he sat them beside with warm tin mugs of chamomile tea. “Make yourselves comfortable,” he said, as though this were possible. Remus had rested his temple in his palm and his face was pale as the grave. He was bouncing his left knee so wildly it creaked the floorboard under the ball of his foot. Sirius thought about telling him to try and calm down but maybe Mr. Dumbledore would be more empathetic to their unfortunate lack of funds if he could tell Remus was sick. 

Indeed when Mr. Dumbledore came back in from the kitchen with biscuits he eyed Remus sympathetically. From the tin lunchbox under his armchair he produced a small white tablet which he cut in half with the penknife he carried in the pocket of his dressing gown. “Compliments of the pharmacist,” he said, offering a piece to each of them. Remus swallowed his dry with an air of utter desperation that Sirius found embarrassing, as though he didn’t itch every second he was looking at the wedge of it and it wasn’t in his mouth. “You boys look rather the worse for wear.” 

“Our Moony has been on a bit of a bender,” Sirius said. Remus gave him a vengeful look. 

“Is that true?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Over at the church again with — ”

“Yeah,” Remus said, louder this time, in attempt at punctuating this line of conversation. 

“Fletcher pulled him out by the scruff of his neck,” said Sirius, eager to un-punctuate it. 

Mr. Dumbledore spoke softly to Remus in a twisted attempt at fatherly admonition. “You know you shouldn’t — ” 

“Yes. I do know.” 

Remus looked at Sirius nervously out of the corner of his eye. Eventually Mr. Dumbledore did too. A wave of crashing, crushing jealousy struck him and dragged him in the sucking riptide under itself. So there was some confidence between them Sirius had not himself managed to breach, as though he didn’t live with Remus and share his doses and works and shoplifted food and clothes and Joyce novels and all the rest of it. 

“What can I do for you boys,” Mr. Dumbledore said eventually. 

“We need something,” Sirius said. The half pill felt like a single drop of blood dispersed in water. “But we don’t have any money.” 

“What do you need?” 

“Skag, pills, whatever.” 

“But preferably skag,” said Remus. “My dole check comes in Thursday and we can pay you for it then.” 

“Then you’ll be paying me on credit for the rest our acquaintance.” 

“Well, maybe…” 

“Isn’t there anything else,” Sirius said. “Anything else at all we could do. Like maybe, um, some yardwork.” As though there was a yard to speak of beyond overgrown reedy grass and rubbish-strewn concrete. “Or the dishes,” he went on, regretting this offer with every word. “Dusting. Vacuuming.” 

“This isn’t a work-to-live hostel.” 

“Of course not. It’s only — ” 

“What about a kiss,” said Mr. Dumbledore suddenly. 

Having expected something like this might one day enter the conversation Sirius found himself not all that surprised. Certainly less surprised than Remus, who drew an overloud breath. “Fine,” he said, standing, brushing biscuit crumbs off his lap. 

“Not me,” Mr. Dumbledore went on, embarrassed. The tips of his ears were flushed red. “The two of you.” 

This was less expected. Sirius sat down again, a little bewildered, in the creaking armchair. Remus was staring intently at the floor at Sirius’s feet but his mouth was just open which was answer enough. There wasn’t much space between them anyway and Sirius closed it. It had been a while since he had kissed anyone at all, as sex and its precedents were just one item in the laundry list of things heroin had made seem less pleasurable or interesting. Remus’s mouth was soft but tightly shut and his eyes were open. Sirius, who had only ever really done this with schoolgirls and one schoolboy when he counted begrudgingly among their ranks, put his hand at Remus’s waist above his hip pressing his thumb a little into the heartbeat in the soft nook there. Eventually he felt Remus’s hand alight at the nape of his neck, and then Remus opened his mouth. The floor dropped first out of the house, then the basement and the mortal plane. 

This was apparently payment enough for a quantity of junk to last until Thursday, which Sirius hid in his wallet. On the long rainy walk back to Elswick they went round back of a supermarket and filtered through the dumpsters. Everything seemed somewhat less dire because of the half pill. Remus kept touching his mouth and eventually Sirius found he too couldn’t stop touching his mouth. “We can’t go see him again,” Remus said around the corner from the house. They were sharing a sleeve of biscuits they’d found in the rubbish. “He’ll want — well you know. You have to up the dose every time to get as high.” 

Sirius looked up and down the block and kissed Remus’s lower lip, which tasted like salt and burnt sugar. 

“We can’t,” Remus said, but he was whispering, and the whisper was so soft and sad Sirius knew he didn’t mean it. 

They were alone in the house and went up into the blue room. Sirius cooked up the junk in the spoon and Remus watched him. When he had prepared the syringe Remus reached out for it. “Let me,” Sirius said. 

It was cold so Remus just took one arm out of his thick navy wool cardigan. Sirius knelt close enough to him to feel his breath and wrapped the rubber rope around his upper arm. He was very slender (bones, freckled scarred skin, slack and atrophying ropes of muscle) and very warm and Sirius could feel the solid and determined heartbeat inside his arm. At the church he had done a number on himself; the marks inside his elbow were angry purple bruises, delicate and patterning like some abstract embroidery, and the sharp blue vein was nearly collapsed. _You know you shouldn’t_ , Mr. Dumbledore had said. He found himself wondering not for the first time what exactly had happened there, especially because clearly it had happened many times before. “Maybe your other arm,” he told Remus. 

Remus shook his head. “I can’t wait for it. Please.” 

“Suit yourself.” 

Following some uncertain primal directive he kissed inside Remus’s elbow and above and below it and rubbed the vein out with his thumb. They both watched slim silver point of the needle break Remus’s patchwork skin. The burst of his blood like a flower in the chamber. Sirius kissed him (it felt like a breach of etiquette, not to kiss someone whilst you penetrated them) and felt his consciousness slip away by increments. Then he undid the tourniquet and put Remus’s cardigan back over his shoulder against the chill. There was a little jewel-bright run of blood inside his arm where the injection had further torn the abused vein. 

He cooked up his own dose, noticing. The bruise like a rose petal inside Remus’s collar. The fraying sleeves of the cardigan and the moth-eaten hole just above the dark light-stain where the school’s insignia might once have been. Biscuit crumbs and ash at the lapel. His hair was thin and sallow and wet still with the rain as were his clumped eyelashes and the shoulders of the sweater. The face drawn as by Egon Schiele. The single crude tattoo of his cryptic collection that Sirius had managed to translate from its original runic messaging simply read _PSALM 137_. So he supposed he had been noticing for a long time. He went and sat beside Remus to administer his own dose and eventually he realized Remus was with it enough to watch him. The imperfect glassy pearls that were his eyes. In what the last unsilenced vestiges of Sirius’s mind recognized as a gesture of affection possibly one step beyond solidarity the broken white shell of Remus’s hand pressed tightly against the side of his thigh. 

\--

[ It didn’t happen like this. It came shattering back into his skull like a freight train much like an overdose would. He lived above a butcher’s shop. Blood became nothing. They sat on the couch together careful not to touch, listening to records, smoking joints, and not talking on purpose. Predictably, after some occasion of narrowly avoided death, it was complicated physically. If you were to believe the drunken soliloquizing of most of the Order this was the central reasoning behind how sex-struck and incestuous their scene had become by early 1980. It could’ve otherwise been the decadent nihilism of the perpetually grieving or those who understood they were doomed to die. 

Things happened quickly. Things had to at war. They lay in bed past noon trying to speak to each other and failing. It’s not all that complicated, he thought when he was alone; it’s whatever rotten fruit of desperation; it’s proof-of-life, proof-of-concept, proof-that-there-might-be-anything-after. Proof-that-there-is-anything-now-besides-death. 

It was. It is. He lay awake beside the other sleeping body in the narrow bed wondering what it would’ve been like to live in this precise flat during the Blitz. The sirens, the walls shaking. Running in the night in one’s dressing gown down into the tube station to wait it out whilst it all shook down. Darkness of such a pitch beyond the window that one might imagine the world had already ended. It is — he is. I am. We are. It is. He covered Remus’s body with his own. What is it, Remus would say, half-asleep, have you had, he yawned, a nightmare, summat; no, he would say, can’t sleep, that’s all; hmm, Remus would say, just hmm. Stop eating chocolate before bed. Then he would turn the pillow over to the cold side and fall asleep again. I fucking love you, Sirius never said, idiotically, I fucking love you and a) if you die I’ll go insane b) if you keep keeping things from me I’ll go insane c) if you are what I think you are I’ll go insane d) all of the above. ] 

\--

He let Remus inject him. Breathing into/out of his mouth as in some post-drowning resuscitation. It got colder and they slept together on the floor in the blue room holding one another against the draught through the broken window. Eventually they found an abandoned twin mattress in a dumpster and dragged it home together though the dark and rainy streets. Sometimes he woke at night warm in a cocoon of their moth-eaten blankets, feeling this other body beside him breathing, and wondered for a moment, utterly lost in a half-dream, why things felt so wrong when he really thought about it. Usually he woke again in the morning and Remus was gone. Sometimes he came back with a dose for them to share or with scavenged food or coffee and sometimes he didn’t come back for days. 

Sirius read the James Joyce novels in Remus’s backpack and walked around the city scouting for pharmacies and attempting to casually and unsuspiciously ascertain how possible it might be to break in. They’d given up going to Mr. Dumbledore’s, even when they had cash from their dole checks, because he’d made it abundantly clear he now expected alternative forms of payment. This was going to be impossible, because the most undressed Sirius had ever seen Remus was out of his shoes and cardigan. He even slept with jeans on, and most if not all of their fumbling on the mattress in the middle of the night, usually as a kind of useless stay against withdrawal symptoms, had been over said jeans. Possibly a great deal of this had to do with the fact that one of the things one sacrificed to junk was one’s libido, and that Remus had been using for a long time; since he was thirteen, James told Sirius once, though it wasn’t exactly clear how true this was. 

They went to see Fletcher or sometimes Fenwick in the squat down by the factory. More than once Sirius went around his family home and threw small stones at his brother’s window to no avail. He knew sometimes Remus went to the church, and whenever he did he got sort of stuck there for a week or so. When he came back he was sick sometimes for a while and Sirius would shoplift tapes and apples and things for him not really certain why he felt so compelled. “Don’t you know someone under the bridge,” James asked him when he discovered Sirius ransacking the entire house for money in order to purchase at the hardware store a crowbar with which he thought he might be able to break into the chemist’s on Westgate Road and steal a bottle of methadone or something. 

Sirius in fact did. Many of them were his old friends from school. He thought certainly his brother went there sometimes, but this wasn’t useful because his brother was so ungenerous and ungrateful. Perhaps he was still embarrassed about being robbed the first time he had shot up there, or else he had some other kind of lingering superstition about it he didn’t care to interrogate further. 

“Wouldn’t do for you to go to jail,” James said casually. He passed Sirius the joint he was puffing on and it quelled the yearning nausea by a scant increment. “They’ll just have you come right down in jail. You’ll be spread all over the floor.” 

“Bloody hell. I won’t — ”

“You’re shaking like a leaf and so I wonder. You know, there’ll be an alarm or something.” 

In the end he and James, accompanied reluctantly by that someone else without a face whose name he was always forgetting, went down to the factory looking for Fenwick, who indeed had some junk he was willing to give them on credit. They stayed there until Friday morning, when Sirius was obliged to go walking up into town and fetch his dole check and then bring half of it back down in order to settle said credit. At the house when he stopped by for his ID Remus was there on his knees before the toilet like a penitent intermittently throwing up acid. 

“You need something?” 

“Yeah.” 

“I can get it for you in like two hours.” 

“Jesus Christ,” Remus said, resting his head against the cold ceramic, “hurry up.” 

He went walking as fast as he could uptown and got the dole check and cashed it, and then he went walking down to the factory to pay Fenwick and buy something for Remus. But when he got down there Fletcher had showed up to hang out with Benj and James and the static, and he had even more stuff. He offered Sirius some, and because Sirius had been in etiquette classes and the like he understood it would have been impolite to say no. So of course by the time he and James got up to the house late that night Remus was gone. 

“Fucking hell,” Sirius said. 

“Well you should’ve just come right back,” said James, likely in attempt to quell his own guilt. 

“Fuck off. He could’ve waited.” 

As though he himself might’ve waited. 

James sighed. He had done a bit of coke with Fenwick before they left and was wired. And he was in a state because he and Lily had been in a fight and she had gone to her sister’s in Jarrow. He ran his hands through his hair and pursed his lips. Sirius understood a Bad Idea was forthcoming in five — four — three — 

“I’m going to the church to get him,” James said. 

“Fucking hell,” Sirius told him again. 

“Fuck off. You’re coming with me.” 

“Like hell I am!” 

“What’ve you got to be afraid of? It’s just a bunch of junkies.” 

“If it’s so tame why do we need to go and get him?” 

But they were already out on the street. James was walking so fast Sirius had to half-jog to keep up. “He forgets himself when he goes there,” James said, as though this were news. As though none of the rest of them enjoyed more-than-occasional self-annihilation. “And he’s our friend.” 

Sometimes, when he was capable of introspective thought, Sirius thought James was the only one of them whose sense of responsibility for the well-being of others had not been utterly decimated by drug dependency. They walked like marathoners through the silent streets. At the church James took the steps two-by-two and Sirius followed less enthusiastically, nearly overwhelmed by paranoia. The great hulking red-brick mass of the place threw a monstrous silhouette against the moonless red sky and through the shattered stained-glass windows flickers of candlelight were visible. The council estates around were scarcely inhabited, as much blighted as their own neighborhood was, and in the pure sweet silence the occasional weak laughter from inside sounded very loud, and like a sort of haunted music. 

“James,” said Sirius from behind him on the steps, paralyzed with fear. “We can’t.” 

“Why can’t we?” 

“It’s just — I’ve such a bad feeling.” 

James rolled his eyes. He was at the bloody door with a poised cokehead nonchalance that suggested he didn’t understand he was opening their very own Pandora’s box. With absolutely no fanfare he opened the door and waltzed inside as though it were a hip nightclub. Petrified to be left alone even outside on the steps Sirius ran up and followed James inside before the door had shut. 

Inside the nave was lit by candles and camping lanterns casting liquid golden light and shadow upon the graffiti- and smoke-marred walls. Most of the pews had been tugged out of the floor and burned on a now-dormant bonfire in the center of the chamber. It was so large that the ends of it and the corners disappeared in milky darkness. Those with enough remaining consciousness to watch them from their nests of blankets and works and rubble collapsed from the ceiling did so with a bone-chilling suspiciousness. When Sirius looked up there was a sheaf of stars visible through the holes in the roof. 

“See,” James said, brightly but quietly, “not so bad.” 

“Bloody hell, Jamie, we’ve got to get the fuck out of here.” 

“Go wait for me outside if you’re going to be so bloody squeamish about it.” 

This prospect sounded even more horrifying, and so Sirius followed James around the shell of the bonfire toward the hollow un-space in the chancel where the altar had been. The fancy golden worshipful things that had been there had been sold for scrap and a smoke-stained fresco of Christ defiled by assorted spray-painted crude imagery looked down pathetically and judgmentally upon the congregation. Left there, cultishly, was the high-backed thronelike chair where the priest had once sat during sermons. A collapsing card table had been brought beside it and decorated with a fine black silk tablecloth upon which assorted works (needles, a spoon, a fine antique lighter and a box of matches, an odd-shaped gummy glass pipe) had been set up thoughtfully as a henge’s menhirs around what looked like a human skull. Tall white tallow candles set around it at the cardinal compass points or else the stations of the cross had mostly melted into the tablecloth. 

“Greyback goes to Leeds to make a buy Friday nights,” said James, but his voice was nervous. “Nothing to be afraid of.” 

Sirius, who was clinging to the back of James’s jumper, nearly laughed at the absurdity of this statement. 

“He’ll be around here somewhere,” James went on. “Remus I mean.” 

“Right.” 

“We should split up and — ”

“No fucking way.” 

“Sirius, nobody here is even conscious.” 

“Well what if Greyback comes back?” 

“Well we can cross that bridge if we come to it. Let go of me and go look back there.” 

James pointed as into death itself into the gaping black maw of the room behind the altar where the priests had prepared while the church was functional. Sirius took one of the candles from the black altar, wholeheartedly expecting to be struck down from on high for such a disruption, and lit it with the antique lighter. Already James was crouching to check the motionless figures in the apse for familiar faces. 

In the small dark room the candleflame threw a sickly golden light that did not reach the walls. He called Remus’s name once in a shaky whisper and then a little louder. Of course there was no answer. Under his feet glass crunched and beer bottles and used needles and brick rubble rolled like kicked stones. Eventually the candlelight threw a whisper of shadow onto a pile of fabrics atop a mattress in a nook in a corner in which there had once been a chapel dedicated to some particular saint. Remus was here, lying in the darkness as a sort of blessed pieta, asleep on his belly and so still at first Sirius thought with a painful shock that he might be dead. 

He knelt beside the mattress on the floor, careful around the glass and sharps, setting the candle down beside him, and touched Remus’s shoulder which was warm and bare. Underneath his palm the breath faded in and out. He kissed the back of Remus’s neck, surprising himself. He did not exactly feel guilty about it yet; after all Remus might’ve done the same to him if presented with the same opportunity. He called out for James who came running in and they got Remus up and wrapped one of the blankets around him and found his shirt and shoes because they were his only ones and then they went out together carrying the limp body between them through the back door into the old rotting garden. 

“Some of them were dead in there,” James said, “in the apse. A couple days maybe.” 

“This bloody place is evil,” Sirius said. Remus’s head lolled against his shoulder. He was holding tightly to Remus’s wrist that had _PSALM 137_ tattooed on it and suddenly he remembered the words out of a lightning flash of spiritus mundi: _happy is the one who repays you according to what you have done to us…_ “Why was he back there?” he asked James. 

“I’ve a notion,” James said. But then he stopped. Whatever the notion was Sirius found he didn’t want to hear it. 

When they arrived at the house they put Remus on the mattress in the blue room and James said he was going to go out and get something for them all to eat, but Sirius knew he was going to try and call Lily at her sister’s. Once he had gone Sirius went to sit with Remus in the blue room. He lit the camping lantern and put a tape on ( _Kilimanjaro_ by the Teardrop Explodes) and set about cleaning the bloody wound inside Remus’s elbow with hydrogen peroxide. Then he got a cloth wet in the kitchen sink and washed the dirt and grime from Remus’s face, his hands, his neck and collar, at last his bare frozen feet, as some removed penance. Eventually the sun came up. James came back in a state without any of the promised food and shot up alone in his and Lily’s room. After another little while Remus woke up. “Oh,” he said without any sound when he saw where he was. 

“I brought stuff back for you but you were gone. So we went and got you.” 

Remus seemed uncertain which of these statements to tackle first, or at all. So he started with the former: “You took your bloody time.” 

“Yeah well Fletch was there — anyway I’m sorry.” 

Remus was quiet for a minute. At last he said, slowly, tasting it, “You keep keeping it from me.” 

“Not on purpose. It’s just — ”

“You’d rather have it for yourself.” 

Sirius didn’t dare even look at him. “Yeah,” he said. 

“It’s alright.” Remus had looked away as well, toward the pale morning light through the window moving on the floor bright and soft as a swatch of cloth. “It’s how it is.” 

“Is it?” 

“You like it more than you like me, don’t you?” He supposed the answer was obvious. It wasn’t worth saying anything at all, so he didn’t. “I like it more than I like you,” said Remus. But it sounded like he was trying to convince himself. “I like it more than I like anything.” 

Sirius found, with a little surprise, he couldn’t stand to hear this. That liquid-acid craving feeling had started running with his blood and lymph and spinal fluid and he wasn’t sure what it was for — 

[ “It’s conditional — isn’t it. I know. It’s alright, you know, alright if it is.” 

His eyes were very bright and cold. And he was wearing one of Sirius’s shirts, which he had put on inside out. They had spent the night fleeing their nearly-certain death on the North York Moors and then they had spent the dawn hour into the morning engaged in desperate fucking. Three nights previous suspicions had for the first time been raised. Sirius wasn’t really sleeping and he was probably doing too much cocaine. Remus disappeared for long periods of time, and nobody would say where he had gone, and every time he came back he was less himself. There was less there. In Sirius’s darker dreams he could see that something was eating it; it was a parasitic thing that had draped itself over Remus’s body like an ectoplasmic black coat. 

It should be me, he tried to tell this thing, the lethifoldish monster in the dreams; if anything devours him it should be me. ]

— and so they lay together on the mattress in the cold blue room. Remus’s mouth was warm and tasted like sleep. They undressed each other fumblingly with numb hands seeking warmth here and there under one another’s arms, between each other’s legs, in each other’s mouths… Eventually Remus dispatched him to the bathroom for the tub of Vaseline and he ran naked down the hall feeling as though he had mainlined an orgasmic dose of the greatest skag known to god or man. 

They scrabbled against each other with elbows and knees and ragged fingernails until at last Sirius covered Remus’s body with his own and kissed the hitherto unseen freckles scattering his back and shoulders. Remus’s open mouth was red and wet and blood-bright as fruit against the mattress and the rucked-up blankets and the way his breath moved his bones and skin seemed tectonic in its hugeness. 

It was like watching him cook up a dose in the spoon — just his presence, nakedness, skin, heartbeat… The knowledge that all too soon every other feeling apart from pleasure would be chased away for however long the rest of space and time could stand to be ignored. He opened the other body up quickly, a little roughly if he was being honest, as one would unwrap a new syringe or a fold of tinfoil with absolute impatience, and then he thrust inside, indelicately, ungracefully, urgently, the same way one would administer one’s dose if one were so desperate. A tiny sound escaped Remus’s lips. His eyes were shut tightly and the lashes were wet. Dear god but Sirius had never thought he might ever look beautiful. 

True to the metaphor he managed a good forty-five seconds of ungainly fucking before it felt too much and he had to stop, at which point Remus reached back and grabbed his ass and held him inside. Sirius let go a string of vague epithets. It seemed this was an act of vengeance for something. _Happy is the one who repays you according to what you have done to us…_

For a while they were still. The sun moved on the floor. He felt as in his own chest the pace of Remus’s breath deepening slowly and when Remus shifted he responded in kind. Then it was easier. 

Afterward they held each other in a long embrace. Remus’s hair smelled like dust. He rubbed Sirius’s back in small circles as though he were a child in need of comfort. He didn't know how long it was. Maybe hours. He slept or something else and dreamed they were in the woods together or the desert at the very beginning or end of the world. They were alone there and the wind was moving in the trees or the thin sand. Eventually Remus said his name once and then again a little more urgently and pulled him bodily out of it. 

“What?” 

“It’s just.” By the sky in the window it was early in the afternoon. Remus’s face and voice were tight. He had waited, Sirius realized with a rush of tenderness, as long as he could stand. “What did you get from Fletch?” 

He got up and found the stuff he’d gotten the evening previous in his jeans pocket. Remus sat up beside him and leaned his temple on Sirius’s shoulder. He was twisting his fingers around each other in his lap the way he did when he was in pain. Eventually he just said, “I’ll cook it.” 

Sirius lay back on the mattress thinking this was the most decadent and lovely thing he could imagine even though Remus’s face was pinched and the vein inside his left elbow was almost collapsed and he was so slight the bones in the tops of his shoulders were visible as tabs from which one might display a skeleton on the wall of a sieged city. His hair was very thin just above his ear and there was a hickey on his neck which Sirius did not remember giving him. The light came dappling in over his shoulders through the broken window like a patterned white blanket. “We’ll share it,” he said, not looking at Sirius, “is that alright?” 

“We just — ”

“Yeah. That’s why I said. It doesn’t matter now.” 

Remus administered the dose to them both. He was obliged to give himself his in the muscle of his thigh, because he couldn’t do the shot in his right elbow left-handed, and by the time it was his turn Sirius was halfway across the galaxy with the Voyager probe listening to Chuck Berry on the Golden Record with the Nordics and the Reptilians and Greys… They lay together while the light moved over and eventually the dream gave way to a true sleep. He woke from this in the night at first uncertain of where he was [ the flat above a butcher’s shop ] when someone knocked upon the door. 

Beside him Remus stirred. In the moonlight through the window Sirius could tell he was dreaming. The movement of the eyes under the thin dewy reddish lids. Then the knock came at the door again. 

[ He had a hair trigger in the end; the sound of the landlord on the stairs had him awake and on his feet. More often than not it was only Remus in the kitchen having come back from wherever they’d sent him, making toast and a fried egg. Blood under the fingernails. ] 

Sirius shook himself out from the dream and got up. He put his jeans on and the first shirt he found on the floor, which was Remus’s. He was too high up still to consider the fact that Remus’s shirt fit him well, despite how much smaller Remus seemed, because he had lost so much weight of late, because food seemed utterly useless. He peeked just an eye into the hallway before he dared to slip out trying to open the door as little as possible. It was James, with a joint; he looked harried. Downstairs from the kitchen, shockingly, Sirius thought he heard Lily’s voice. “I’ve been out to Fletch’s,” James said. “Maybe you should come downstairs. Is Remus up?” 

“No.” 

“Should we get him up?” 

“I don’t know, should we? What’s happening?” 

James didn't say anything. He herded Sirius downstairs. Fletch and Dearborn and Fenwick and Lily and the faceless static one, who none of the rest of them seemed to notice had such a face or lack thereof, were all down in the kitchen eating a red checkered paper boat of soggy chips from the place down the street. Sirius was offered a lukewarm beer which he accepted somewhat reluctantly and indeed he sliced his thumb open on the sharp rim around the tab. Within five minutes it was somehow nonverbally delegated to James that he should tell Sirius the news they had all come here to discuss, which was that Sirius’s brother was dead. 

\--

[ Good god where was this man now. Sometimes he remembered the world was still going on somewhere outside. And perhaps it had been years. Eventually he wept. The name and face moved into and out of his mind like a bird. ] 

They went to the movies and sat in the stillness and the dark, and sometimes fell asleep and were awoken by disgruntled ticket-takers. They took the bus to South Shields and walked out onto the jetty and craned their eyes across the North Sea. Sometimes it was easiest to imagine there was nothing out there. The rest of the world might’ve been sinking. 

Death came indiscriminately for each of them and touched their lives indelibly. When Fenwick died it was June. He had been at the house just the day before trying to steal Sirius’s leather jacket. A crooked cop who came to buy junk from James sometimes told them no one had claimed the body for burial and it was going to be put in the potter’s field. They meditated upon this sadly in the kitchen and there was talk of pooling funds for a funeral but in the end they did precisely nothing, and the city took possession of the corpse. They heard dark news of a virus spreading through London in part via the sharing of heroin needles; this seemed no more dire than any other symptom of apocalypse, and of course by that time there had been so many. 

\--

Withdrawing was like being shoved into a body which one no longer fit. It was less astral and as such it was a great deal smaller. Sirius had gone up to his parents' house for the worst of it, shaking apart on the bus, because it became rapidly clear no one else living in the Elswick squat, least of all Remus, intended to quit alongside him in solidarity. They were careful to perform the necessaries out of his direct line of sight but they were not available for any commiseration or nursemaiding whatsoever and the temptation was so great he considered abandoning the attempt just about his every conscious moment. 

Going to his parents' seemed some paradoxical act of self-preservation and suicide in tandem. He lay in his childhood bed and let it wash over him in wracking draughts. His father was busy with preparations and his mother had gone away again to whenever she went and would remain there until the day of the ceremony. Family stopped by with casseroles and spoke hushedly to the butler in the foyer. Sirius's teeth were chattering too loudly to hear the specifics of any conversation. 

Dreams dissolved. He found his consciousness closer and closer to the hollow vessel which remained of his physical self and this terrified him above all else. For perhaps an entire day he imagined he was alone in a prison cell listening to the endless suffocating wash of sea and he could not even rise to his feet to slam his fists upon the rusted iron door. It was the vengeance of the drug, which hated to be left, as though it were his jealous lover. In the darkest moments he supposed it was. It was at least more faithful than Remus, who had said he might visit but never did. It had a fist around his gut and twisted. He remembered his brother and wept. He remembered the filthy mattress in the sacristy upon which he and James had found Remus and wept. 

[ He recalled the corpse in the hallway and wept. He recalled the corpse in the nursery on the patterned rag rug unbloody in the moonlight and wept. He recalled the last time he had spoken to Remus and wept. Sometimes when the wind blew right he thought he could grasp tenuously like shreds of wool pulling apart in his hands the entire memory and the entire truth. He would have wept on this too but as was customary it was snatched from him before its definition could entirely develop. ] 

Pure will alone allowed him to withstand it. Later on he would reflect on this and wonder if on this occasion he had used up all of it. On the day of his brother’s funeral he woke at dawn and sat on the edge of the bed watching out the window as the newspaper boy rode by on his bicycle to deliver the Daily Mail. Eventually he stood. In the mirror in the bathroom it looked like he had gouged away at himself here and there (under the cheekbones, collar, shoulders, chest) with a melon baller. He found a pair of scissors and cut his thin lank hair into the toilet and shaved his face (in doing so gouging another chunk out of his jaw) and drew a bath so hot he could hardly stand to sit in it. Afterward he dressed in the suit his father had given him for his maternal grandfather’s funeral four years previous, which was too short in the ankle and necessitated a tight belting around his waist. He combed his wet hair and brushed his teeth. Then he went downstairs and sat in the parlor room and read the paper. It felt like some kind of avant-garde performance art piece. In the smoke-frosted mirror above the hearth he looked like a dissolute gentleman of property having only recently by the skin of his teeth recovered from a bout with the Spanish Flu. Eventually his father and his aunt and uncle came in, having formed a kind of protective phalanx around his mother, who was walking unsteadily likely on account of all the antipsychotic sedatives; they very purposefully did not look in his direction, and they disappeared up the stairs. 

Fletcher had learned from a client of his who lived under the bridge that Regulus had died there from an overdose. Sirius could not find it in himself to pity his brother all that much and in fact during the withdrawal he had often found himself disconcertingly envious. Don’t you understand, he almost told his parents, this basically means he died from pleasure of a larger quantity than one's body is built to stand… 

It became clear there would not be room for him in the black limousine his father had ordered, so Sirius bummed a cigarette from the driver and set off walking to the church at the edge of the cemetery. It was a cool day and he was shaky still and the short walk left him winded. Outside he finished the cigarette. A few mourners looked like they wanted to approach him with condolences but decided against it. Perhaps, Sirius thought, he would tell people if they asked that he had just had a bad pneumonia. He went inside and looked at his brother in the fine cherry-wood casket for a long moment. The mortician had not necessarily succeeded in making it look like he was only sleeping, and the funeral director had crowned his head with bouquets of flowers that certainly had some symbolic meaning. “You greedy fuck,” Sirius whispered. “Bloody idiot.” 

He dared to clasp the narrow shoulder in the fine black wool suit. Then he was immediately obliged to run out through the transept door into the dying autumn garden to vomit. By the time he had recovered the ceremony had started, and his family were in attendance in melodramatic black garb like an unkindness of ravens in the front rows. He sat near the back and listened absently to the priest’s toneless monologuing about ashes, dust, and the embrace of god. Eventually he opened the Bible in the back of his pew and read Psalm 137: _By the waters of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion…_

He wanted to help carry the casket but was muscled back by his father. He followed the hearse to the cemetery on foot and watched as the shell containing the shell which was his brother in this world was lowered into the hole in the family plot by machinery. Silence intercut by crows and the wind in the bare trees. Nobody cried. After a while he bummed a cigarette from his cousin, then walked back to his parents’ house to get his things. He didn’t want to go back to Elswick, but neither did he want to stay in Jesmond. He thought about taking the train to London or Edinburgh but he had no money, and after a quick circuit through the old hiding places he found there was none in the house either, which was certainly intentional. His brother’s room had been rendered ascetic and impersonal as a tomb. Certainly at the end he had been staying under the bridge. Sirius sat on the bed watching the grey autumn light through window filtering the motes of dust in the air. 

After a while he left the house and walked. The black limousine his father had rented pulled past him up the block. It took him perhaps an hour and a half to walk, weak in the knees, down to the rail bridge over the River Tyne. When he got to the tamped-down desire path through the brush and weeds that folk who lived there took down to their squat Fletcher was coming up from it. “Alright, Black,” he said a little sadly. 

“Yeah, you?” 

Fletcher embraced him. He smelled terrible. “Spiffy suit,” he said when he pulled away. 

“I’ve just come from the funeral.” 

“Have you gone off skag then?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Terrible, innit? What’re you doing here?” 

“Dunno really.” 

“Any of them down there could’ve given him the dose,” Fletcher said. He put a hand on Sirius’s shoulder and urged him back up toward the road. “You can’t know for sure.” 

They walked together back toward the house. “I do know none of them called an ambulance til he was dead,” Sirius said. 

“Likely they hadn’t realized it,” said Fletcher. “He was a smart boy, he was; he knew how much he was taking. It must have been a funny batch, so I figure. They were all too far gone to see til it was much too late.” 

For the first time Sirius realized it might very well have been Fletcher who had sold the whole batch to them all in the first place. “Right,” he said. 

At the house Lily and James and Remus and Dearborn and some other smudged-out people were in the back making a bonfire in the oil drum with rubbish and old newspaper. He felt like a soldier coming home from war such were the embraces and the claps on the back. Remus was watching him with some illegible expression he had the feeling perhaps he could translate if he were high. But then he said he was going inside to see if he could find some wood to burn. 

Some people came over perhaps lured like moths to the bonfire. They brought beers and cigarettes and a cold pizza and some coke and some Ecstasy in an old tin matchbox bearing the name of a resort in Plymouth. Some people came over to tell Sirius they were sorry and select among them (those who had sampled the E) launched into heartfelt monologues about losing siblings and friends and parents and grandparents and cherished pets. How _are_ you, they asked, rather weightily. Sober, he wanted to say; in other words really not sure. 

It felt like there was a little green spark thing growing in his chest — like a seedling pushing out through the cold wet winter ground at just the very taste of warmth. But he couldn’t very well say that. Eventually he went upstairs into the blue room alone because he had nothing to say to anybody. Not long after that Remus joined him. “Like your suit,” Remus said, closing the door behind himself. 

“Thanks.” 

“Do you want to talk about it?” 

“I don’t know.” 

Remus sat down beside him on the mattress folding his long gangly arms and legs like some strange insect. There was a bout of raucous laughter from outside that made Sirius’s gut ache with jealousy. Gingerly, as if he might not be allowed, Remus touched Sirius’s hair behind his ear. “And you cut it,” he said. 

“Yeah.” 

“I remember we learned, some places they do that as a sort of gesture of mourning.” 

He wanted to cry but felt he couldn’t anymore. He hated how trapped he felt in this world now. There was nowhere left to go, as there had never been anywhere left to go, but headlong for oblivion. Remus kissed him; his mouth tasted like the shitty lager Dearborn always brought from the corner shop and Sirius clutched desperately at him as a life raft or some final remaining token against death. 

[ It had happened like this even before. The dawn in the woods — they held together and at home in the violet unlight through the window they collapsed. ] 

He chased this as everything away. He went looking for something else he had missed and he prayed it was here — in this body, this other mind, this battered soul. Something was, some spark of feeling welling up, like heat lightning; they had once watched it from the jetty at Tynemouth move in slowly and silently across the North Sea shifting and leaping between the heavy clouds, and at the last they had run back to the bus and leapt inside, laughing, drenched, pressing tired foreheads against the cold windows on the long drive home along the Coast Road. And he had felt alive then and joyous and loved. And his brother was alive. They were all alive. They loved each other. He might’ve died for them then running barefoot in the streets. Half of them were dead now and others were otherwise gone. Others moved further and further every day like jetsam. 

He did weep eventually and Remus palmed the tears from his face and shushed him like a child and kissed his hair. “I missed you,” Remus whispered. “God. I thought you wouldn’t ever come back.” He was stroking Sirius’s hair back from his face. Sirius might’ve done anything he said. Especially this, which was, “Push off with me.” 

Some measure of recently-regained wobbly-kneed self-control reared its nervous head. “But I just — ”

“I know — it’s, it kills me. Doing it without you these last weeks.” 

What about the church, Sirius couldn’t say. 

“Just once,” Remus went on. 

“It’s never just once.” 

Remus didn't address this, because it was an inalienable fact. Instead he said, very softly, and his eyes were big and dark and wet in the moonlight, like the bottoms of wells reflecting starlight, almost swooningly ridiculous, like something out of a cheap novel, “I love you.” 

He found with horror that he couldn’t say it back. It was stuck in his throat and behind his teeth like overdone toffee. He couldn’t say it because he didn’t know if it were true. Mostly he wasn’t sure which piece of it he loved. So he said, “Alright.” 

“Alright?” 

“Yeah, yes, alright, get on with it.” 

Remus did. Sirius felt perhaps finally he could breathe. The sound of it crackling in the spoon like the most perfect astral music. As angels bloody singing between the stars and echoing cavernously in the corners of galaxies… I love you, he thought, desperately yearning, with the pure screaming clarity of absolute truth, I love you, I love you, I’ll never leave you, I’ll never go away again, only let me, just let me back inside — 

Remus leant over him on the filthy mattress biting his lower lip between his teeth just so and pressed the spike of the syringe into the vein inside Sirius’s elbow and then everything went where it belonged, which was out of this world…

[ Nuclear vacancy. A separation on the most minute level yet conceivable could tear the fabric of time. Everything stopped, and the world shifted on its orbit, and then it wobbled again onward through space like a blind journeyman seeking parts unknown. It was so silent in the house for a moment he believed it was a dream. He sent the ectoplasmic dog ahead of him and it stopped beside the bodies and lay down crying. Then they moved on together again in the darkness. He picked up the baby, who was reaching up for him from the crib. He remembered he had had an evil dream. He wondered if this was still a dream. After all it as all else could not be possible. And it could not be over. Quite simply it could not be over. It would go on forever — it had to. There was nothing else. It was inside him now — its amber thread. Like a puppet string. It tugged on him sometimes and woke him from sleep. He struggled to believe anything was truly real. 

They went out of the house together. He was holding the baby’s head against his shoulder so he wouldn’t see. He figured later he would come back for the bodies. Outside the growing half-moon was hung in the sky like a glowing ornament and at the sight of it he practically fell to his knees. Then he remembered they had told no one. ] 

Eventually the dawn stirred in the high window, like a bird. His heart kicked a few jazzy out-of-time beats against his ribs. He sat up, longing, in the rumpled suit. Beside him Remus was awake watching the movement of the light on the ceiling. “Alright?” he said. 

“Funny dreams.” 

“I have them too.” 

He got up and stretched. He had these terrible mud-tasting cigarettes from the corner shop and they shared one sitting close together on the mattress. “What kind of dreams,” Sirius asked him. 

“The moon,” Remus said. “Running. Things that happened.” 

“What things?” 

Remus didn’t say anything. Outside it was raining. It had begun to chew at him already, because it had been so long. It was like being starved for weeks and at last being allowed just one bite of foie gras at dinner — rich enough to kill, urgently not enough. And the silence similarly had started chewing, as it did; sometimes he was lucid enough to realize they didn’t have much to talk about, in part because Remus wouldn’t talk about anything, and in part because heroin made it so that all one could talk about was heroin, and there had already been enough conversation between them on this subject for a lifetime. At first he had thought, with an anachronistic sort of romance exacerbated by the drug, that this was perhaps indicative of some deeper astral understanding between them which made normal communication obsolete. Perhaps it had been in the hellmouth of misery itself that he had realized it was something other. 

“Well have you got any more then,” Sirius asked him at last. 

“I haven’t.” 

“We’ll have to go out and buy some more.” Remus didn’t say anything to that, so Sirius went on. “Have you got any money?” 

“Thought you might.” 

“My parents confiscated my dole checks.” 

“Whyever would they do that.” 

So I wouldn’t go out again and do exactly bloody this, Sirius didn’t say. 

“What about your suit,” Remus said. He wouldn’t quite look in Sirius’s direction. 

“What about it?” 

“You could pawn it.” 

“This is my — Jesus. No.” 

“It’s just a suit.” 

“Well I’ve nothing else.” 

Remus scrubbed his hand over his mouth. _PSALM 137_ on the back of his wrist. “It’s Monday,” Sirius said, realizing something. 

“So?” 

“So your dole check comes on Thursday. So you’ve spent it all already? On skag just for one person?” 

“Well I’ve had to eat, haven’t I…” 

“You’ve eaten out of dumpsters as long as I’ve bloody known you. What’ve you done with it?” 

“It isn’t bloody yours,” Remus said. He had gotten to his feet and gingerly he put his old blue sweater over his shoulders against the chill. Sometimes it shocked Sirius how slight he was and sometimes he couldn’t be bothered to care. This time the latter. Remus went on: “It’s none of your business what I do with my money.” 

“Well you’ve just been asking after mine!” 

“The both of us need something,” Remus said slowly, as though he were explaining to a child. “I haven’t anything. You’ve been living in the lap of luxury for two weeks, and so I wonder — ”

“I’ve been on death’s door for two weeks but I suppose it’s all come to naught now.” 

“Please,” Remus said, “it won’t kill you going off it.” 

“Really? Have you ever done it?” 

He meant this as a coup. But Remus said, “Yeah, when I was thirteen. For parents’ weekend.” 

He folded his arms over his chest as a sort of dare. It was altogether the most he had ever said about anything that had happened in his life in the fifteen years of it before he had come to Newcastle. This, Sirius realized, was Remus’s attempt at a coup. “How was it,” he asked Remus bitterly. 

“Bad. He — someone brought me, you know, soup and tea; tried to get methadone, couldn’t, so he said.” 

“Who?” 

“Who do you think?” 

“I don’t — ”

“I suppose you haven’t met him. We could go there.” 

“Where?” 

“The church,” Remus said, as though it were obvious. 

The wheels of Sirius’s mind worked. He was remembering the shadow in the corners, textured, like smoke; present, shifting. [ Something there. ] The sense that behind every mass of fallen rubble there was some terrible memory which belonged to another self. “I’m not going there.”

Remus was putting his shoes on. The same old hole in the sole of the left one showed his bare foot. “Suit yourself,” he said. 

“Well can’t you bring something back for me?” 

“It doesn’t work that way.” 

“Then how does it work?” For a moment he thought he might’ve believed the unthinkable, which was that Remus would answer this. But he didn’t. As though he hadn’t heard the question he put his arms almost reluctantly in the sweater. He was waiting for Sirius to convince him not to walk out the door. “You can’t go there,” Sirius tried, obligingly, “it’s an evil place; you know, last time we got you, there were all these corpses…” 

“What else can we do then. If you really do have no money.” 

“Why in hell would I lie? I don’t know. We could go to Mr. Dumbledore’s — ”

“I’m not sucking your dick for his pleasure.” 

“Well you’ve done it for less.” Remus’s mouth tightened impossibly further. “I’ll suck yours then,” Sirius said diplomatically. 

“Fuck off.” 

“Is it really any worse than — ”

“Yes.” 

Sirius stood up and Remus took a defensive step back. If he had been in a righter mind (if it had been eight hours ago when he’d been sober) he might’ve felt a touch guilty. “I’ll go myself,” he said. 

“Well enjoy your performative wank.” 

“I bloody will, you cunt. Enjoy your old friend.” 

“I always fucking do,” Remus said bitterly. “Do me a favor and don’t come and bloody get me this time.” 

“Fucking gladly,” said Sirius. He went out the door and slammed it so heavily behind him that the whole house shook. Then he pounded down the stairs and out the front door. It had been left wide open in the night and the rain was coming in onto the moldy carpet. 

In the cold wet silent street in the sideways needle rain in the brutal grey light of the perpetual night which was in fact only the morning he could not altogether believe what he had just done. He had gone through all that bloody suffering for positively nothing thanks to Remus, who had been frying his brains with skag since he was twelve years old apparently and who was resultantly incapable of empathy or love, though he claimed this and wielded it as a sort of weapon; who was very good at being damaged, and very good at making it seem like nothing was really his fault and he hadn’t so much made bad decisions as he had been coerced into those decisions by persons, winds, feelings, spiritual entities, and/or gods unknown; whose last remaining human capability was quite possibly his terror of loneliness, in service of which he would do perhaps anything to keep from alienating those who could be considered “friends;” and who Sirius loved, of course, and who loved Sirius in return, in the worst and most selfish way, or perhaps in no way at all, in some sticky spiderweb tangle violated by what they had injected into it again and again… 

He had been walking north toward Mr. Dumbledore’s but it became clear to him suddenly that he couldn’t stand to walk an hour for it, let alone engage in the requisite small talk and performative masturbation. Certainly the process of his own mind down this path would end him before then. If he was going to die it was going to be how his brother had. He turned on his heel and walked back down St. James Boulevard toward the rail bridge over the river.

\-- 

[ When they were twelve in the common room he had asked Remus how it had happened and Remus had refused to say. Sirius had gotten it in his head perhaps it had been reported in the local paper or something so he went to the library (cutting class) and asked Madame Pince to help him do the research via microfiche. This of course she declined. At home on the holidays he read disgustedly through one of his father’s magazines, a tome published quarterly by the hyper-conservative party currently in substantial minority in the Wizengamot (though its ranks would grow substantially over Sirius's lifetime), which described werewolf attacks in excruciating detail in order to justify its agenda to have them all imprisoned, killed, or at least sterilized. His father noticed him reading this and took Sirius aside to privately express his pride and his hope that Sirius would grow up to understand the concepts delineated within as the only way the future of the pure wizarding race could be sanctified. Sirius nodded, studying his distorted reflection in his father’s recently-shined shoes. Then he went upstairs and threw up in the toilet. “What’s wrong with you,” said Regulus, who was also in the bathroom, carefully cutting his own hair. At dinner that night with the Lestranges and the Lenoirs, visiting from the estate near Orléans, they were served fine dragon steaks (so rare the inside was green) which Sirius couldn’t bear to taste or even look at very long. 

They were sixteen, sitting alone together by the lake smoking a joint, because the others had detention; he asked Remus again. “Oh,” said Remus, as though he were relating an anecdote about his parents, who had started fighting the summer previous, “he came in the window. Was quick. I hardly remember.” 

“Really?” 

Remus thought for a minute. He passed the joint back. “No,” he said eventually.

They never spoke about it any more. He knew Remus met Greyback sometime during the war but he had had his suspicions by then and had taken it as evidence that there was some horribly manifest intimacy between them that he could never share, or even understand; he had never drawn Remus’s blood; he had never, though he tried, managed to remake this person in his own image… They ran into each other at Highgate Cemetery on the afternoon before the full moon and then they went together that night to Kent Downs and spent the night running. It was September. They woke together in the morning in the cold dewy grass watching a storm come in over the channel. ] 

\--

He woke up in a funny smooth cold womb inside a deafening sound. The world was a gestural blur. Above the sound the voices in a soft and soothing melisma had no meaning only presence. Then someone touched his hair. Against the continual demand from some pre-language place in the brainstem he focused into the touch and things developed like a polaroid photograph. 

They had put him in the cold shower. They were James and Lily by the vague colors and shape of the hair and by Lily’s rose perfume and James’s cheap aftershave. He tried to sit but couldn’t and was possessed by a brief fear that he had exhausted all his faculties at last and would never move or speak again. 

“Bit of a bender, didn’t we,” said James pleasantly. Sirius groaned. 

“We dragged you out from under the bridge by your ankles,” Lily said. He didn’t doubt she was serious. “What were you thinking?” 

He tried his voice and miraculously it worked-ish. “Nothing,” he said. James laughed, but this was true. Lily seemed to grasp it, and she looked away, curling a strand of her hair absently around her finger. “Where’s Remus?” 

“We thought you might know.” 

“I don’t know anything.” 

“He’ll be at the church then.” 

He sat up. Everything spun and the color drained from the world then rushed back again all at once so it just blushed black. Lily grabbed his wrist so tightly he could feel the warm metallic rime of her rings. They had put him in the shower with all his clothes on and the sodden clamminess of the fabric snuck through his moth-eaten patchwork skin and veins and grist into his bones and shook them. 

They were talking quietly with one another. A sound between them like a heartbeat rushing in an infected ear. Something else moving between them he couldn’t see unless he closed his eyes. He felt cowed and utterly humiliated in the presence of it and very nearly he wept. Perhaps he fell asleep or passed out again or something because the next thing he conceptualized as reality was James getting him to his feet somehow inside this thick charcoal well of darkness. “I can’t bloody see,” he said. But it came shaking out like a rush of breath. 

“You’re going to bed and I’m barring the door,” said James, “you sodding idiot.” 

“Where’s Lils.” 

“Gone to get Remus back from Greyback.” 

He tried to say that Remus hadn’t wanted to be gotten back but couldn’t. In the bedroom James had to help him get his clothes off. He sat naked and wildly shaking on the edge of the bed and James dried his hair with a clean-ish t-shirt of Lily’s from the floor. 

“You still up enough?” James asked. 

“Yeah.” 

“I’ve got pills to help you come down.” 

“Cheers, Jamie.” 

“Only you’ve got to stop doing that. Both of you have got to stop doing that.” 

“Doing what?” 

“Trying to hurt each other by hurting yourselves.” 

“It’s not that,” he said. James helped him get under the blankets and then he threw his parka from the floor and two jumpers over the top when Sirius didn’t stop shaking. He was still high enough that nothing seemed quite real and as such it was very easy to talk about it even around his teeth chattering. “I love him so much,” he told James. Otherwise the rime of setting sunlight through the window haloing around James’s head as a sort of winsome aura. “I’m obsessed with him. God, it’s horrible. I’d rather not think about it at all.” 

He felt the bed dip when James sat beside him. He adjusted the matted faux-fur collar of his parka so that it covered Sirius’s wet hair. “Why not?” 

“I’m deluding myself, I am. It’s a fiction, like a pretty fiction. That we could, you know.” 

“Be together? I mean, maybe not in Newcastle — ” 

“That isn’t — not what I — I mean there is no future so how could we — ”

“Don’t say that.” 

“What?” 

“Don’t. Of course there is. Of course time goes on.” 

“Not for us, Jamie, my god… living in this house… the future moves in, you know, some twelve hour chunk of time, when you have a hit, when you need another, that’s all. That’s all there is.” 

“Jesus. How can you say something like that?” 

“For god’s sake don’t be so bloody sanctimonious.” He wasn’t even sure if he was speaking. Maybe he was just thinking and somehow James could hear it. “Like you don’t — cause I know you do the same. And Remus does as well. He has a great deal more that he wants to forget about, he does… It’s like heaven to him… It’s the reward for all his saintly suffering…” 

It pulled away slowly as stretching taffy. [ He dreamed he was underwater in a sinking ship. ] 

He woke in the night and laid in the dark for a while breathing. The shaking had some other antecedent now. His head ached and his stomach twisted like the wringing of a bad hangover. Eventually he got up and went to find James and the pills. He remembered perhaps he should be a little embarrassed to speak to James because evidently he’d said something pretty horrible a few hours ago but he didn’t remember what it was. He dressed stumbling and coltishly in the first jumper and trousers he found on the floor and then he went out into the hall. 

“ — at the church,” Lily was saying from downstairs. “I can’t get him out.” 

“He wouldn’t come with you?” James asked. 

“Greyback’s there. Nobody would help me carry him out.” 

“Bloody hell, okay. Alright.” 

“Would Greyback meet us for a deal?” 

“Not you or I now he probably knows what we’re up to,” James said. “We can get Sirius up — ”

“If he thinks you or I are suspect certainly it extends to Sirius. Besides I’d be surprised if he could speak coherently on the phone.” 

“Dearborn, then. And he’ll have the money.” 

“Right. God damn. I hate owing him favors…” 

Sirius went back into the room and lay down. Eventually from downstairs he heard the low rumble of Dearborn’s voice then the doors opening and closing and at last a shaky and fearful silence. When he found he could trust the purity of that silence he got up and put the light on and set about digging through James’s scattered things for the promised pills. Through all the drawers and all the pockets of all the pants and through the assorted purses Lily carried and the pockets of Lily’s wool skirts and dresses, the shoebox under the bed containing assorted gummy well-used works, the other shoebox under the bed containing their birth certificates and an old driver license of James’s and Lily’s expired passport and photographs of their families and a tiny velvet pouch of — Sirius’s heart briefly jolted and then he cursed them both aloud — quaaludes, and the tearing lining of a suitcase also found under the bed which smelled overwhelmingly like mothballs and yielded precisely nothing. By this time he was shaking so badly he couldn’t properly grasp anything he touched and he’d trashed the room beyond repair. As such it was likely when James and Lily came back with Remus — if they came back with Remus at all — they would likely withhold whatever they had from him in vengeance. 

Why couldn’t they’ve left him there, he thought before he could stop it, after all it was where he wanted to be; he didn’t want to be here, he didn’t want to be anywhere at all. And Remus wanted to be where he was, after all he’d told Sirius that point-blank; though he didn’t act like he wanted to be there he always ended up going back to that place and those people in his moments of desperate and primal need, which were not few. 

Eventually he got up and went across the hall into the blue room and looked around there for a while until he found in Remus’s canvas rucksack another of the orange bottles prescribed to Greyback. This he threw out the broken window when he realized it was empty. Other than that the only things in the backpack were a grey sweatshirt, a pocket Bible and a copy of _The Dubliners_ , a pen and a notebook (empty, but whole chunks of pages had been torn out), and the six tapes Remus owned. Sirius opened each of these cases just to check that Remus had not hidden any items of interest in with the cassettes and indeed in the last one he checked — the Clash’s _Give ‘Em Enough Rope_ — he found Remus had rolled up a bit of tinfoil and shoved it into one of the spindles. 

“You fuck,” said Sirius aloud. His voice broke. He felt painfully, hollowingly betrayed. “God fucking damn you.” 

He set about trying to pry the tinfoil out of the spindle with the pen and he was in process of this when there was commotion out front. Very quickly he shoved everything back in Remus’s backpack including (achingly) the Clash tape and hastened as well as he could on trembling knees out into the hall. It wouldn’t do for him to be rushing down the stairs to greet them in the door so he went back into James and Lily’s room. They had probably already seen the light on so he left it. Inside him everything was twisting. He thought about going back to the other room and getting the Clash tape. But then he heard their voices downstairs. A blur of whispered shuffled sound he craned his ringing ears into as though he sought some coded message: 

“ — careful with his head — ”

“He can’t feel a goddamn thing.” 

“He will when he wakes up.” 

So they had brought him back. Maybe there was something horrible like disappointment or a muted, stale rage circling like sharks in Sirius’s gut with the nausea and all the other acrid, bilious bullshit. 

“How much did you spend,” he heard James ask. 

“Fifty pounds.” Dearborn’s voice. “Pills. Like mostly benzos. It’ll take me two months to get through em.” 

Struggling on the stairs. Then the shower running. Someone shouted, and then there was a cacophony of muffled sounds. Something fell from a height. Eventually Dearborn excused himself and went running down the stairs and out the front door as though fleeing the scene of a crime. 

Sirius listened to his heartbeat in his ears and the voice between them which was saying, no one will notice now if you go back into his room and take that Clash tape and whatever’s in it and cook it up and shoot it. No one will notice and no one will begrudge you that because of what you’ve been through and because you need it. After all you have spent the last four days destroying your ability to process reality and as such it probably won’t even knock you out. Besides he owes you one. Or more than one. He owes you a hundred thousand million. You after all spend most of your conscious moments bleeding out impossibly slowly through wounds he inflicted. 

He lay back down in the bed and put the light off and listened to the voice. To his heartbeat, to the shower down the hall. Sirens in the street. After a little while a couple went by outside laughing uproariously for so long it seemed as though the entire world had gotten stuck in a groove. He listened to the house, its creaking, settling, broken glass, the wind moving in the tiles on the roof, to the city and to the night, to the voice, and at last to some other sound he thought at first was imagined, which he realized eventually was the sound of sobbing. 

He didn’t know how long it had been but he knew he’d been sick twice out the window when James came in spilling the ice-pick light from the hall across the carpet. He put the light on and looked around at the wreckage of the room with little change in the expression on his face. “Alright?” 

“Have you got — ” 

“ — yeah, thought you might be jonesing.” 

The little white pills were in James’s pocket folded in a square of drafting paper. He saw fit to allow Sirius two, which he sat up in the bed to inspect before he swallowed them dry. 

“What is it?” 

“Methadone. It’ll take a minute to hit.” 

“Right. Cheers.” 

“Cheers.” 

He found himself suspicious suddenly — as was the manner of things upon the tide’s recession — about where James had gotten the pills. Never before had he made out that he had access to a chemist or anything of the sort and it seemed that he perhaps he had been keeping this from Sirius since the beginning of their friendship. “Where’d you get these,” he asked. 

James ignored him. “I haven’t seen Remus so bad before,” he said bluntly. “But he’ll be okay. In case you care.” 

“Oh. But James — ”

“Whenever he comes back from that place he looks like hell. He looks chewed up.” 

“Well what do you want me to do about it?” 

This, at last, seemed to stump him. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “Be kinder to — ”

“ — I am kind for god’s sake. He’s the cruel one.” 

“Either of you could say that and believe yourselves to be right. I’m bloody sick of it.” 

“Then leave it the fuck alone.” 

James’s mouth tightened and something about his face closed. “Fine,” he said, standing up. “Next time I’ll leave you there. I’ll fucking leave you both there.” 

For some reason James straightened the blankets on the bed. His hands were shaking. He looked as though he wanted to say something else but couldn’t stand to have even thought it. Do it, Sirius didn’t say, leave us both, I dare you, I bloody dare you. “James.” 

“What, for god’s sake.” 

“Where’d you get these pills?” 

“Christ. Is it the only thing on your mind?” 

This question was of course rhetorical. Sirius didn’t say anything. 

James exhaled heavily through his nose. For a moment he watched out the window at the full moon moving across the sky as though he were trying to gauge what exactly he should disclose. “Lily’s pregnant,” he said at last. “So these are so I can quit. She’s already quit. She went cold turkey as soon as she found out. But I can’t — I’ve tried. Anyway are you happy?” 

He was utterly stunned by it, as though it were some bolt of lightning to the skull, or a dose from the kind of very bad batch that felt cold and electric and dragged at your skin like some unseen current that had always been in the air but that you had never been hollow and still enough to feel before. 

“I’m — she, you know, she wants to — ”

“She’s set her mind to it yeah. You know she miscarried like a year ago.” 

“I didn’t know that.” 

“It was horrible, you know, I sat with her, it just, like it bled out. For the best, you know; we were all so in it then.” 

As though they weren’t all still so in it. As though it weren’t — 

[ It lived with them in step every day. _Who is the third who walks always beside you?_ ] 

“Is it working,” Sirius asked him. 

“Yeah. I think. I mean while you were gone, I was hell of sick. But it’s better. It’s moving, you know, away from me.” He folded his arms tightly across his chest like a shield and he looked, mindfully, away from Sirius, at the wreckage of the room strewn across the floor. And yet when faced with this most tangible evidence of poisonous dependence and distrust and jealousy he still said what he had been planning to say, which was: “I was going to ask you to be the baby’s godfather.” 

\--

[ This was another memory which by now had rotted almost beyond recognition. Devoured — dust to dust. Sometimes he felt like an archaeologist inside his own mind dusting centuries of filth from ancient relics and piecing the broken bits together using only context clues and a kind of inherited collective memory on which his grasp was increasingly tenuous. He remembered faint, indistinct wisps of the vapid, embarrassing, and useless. The first time he had ever smoked pot. Going to a Muggle supermarket with Remus in a beach town called Maidencombe where the Lupins had rented a very cheap bungalow for a week in August where it did positively nothing but rain. Receiving hysterical owls regarding girl trouble from James in the dead of night in his garret room in Grimmauld Place and thinking and nearly writing (he was fifteen and no one in the house would speak to him), get back to me when you have real problems. Shoplifting cassette tapes on the Portobello Road. Dinner with his father and the Lenoirs in a speakeasy on Knockturn Alley where his uncle Ghyslain had ordered chimera crudo and a ninety-Galleon steak cut from the flank of a kelpie. 

This: he and James had decided to go for a walk in South Ken. December. He recalled he had been thinking James had figured something out and wanted to talk about it and indeed for the first half hour of so of the walk it had been pushing inside his mouth, like perhaps he should just get it out: I slept with Remus, I think I’m in love; but I don’t know, because I don’t know how real anything is, because of the war, because everything I feel is too much and too little, because death comes and crawls inside my head through my ear every night and every day. Finally they went to a pub and got large gins and pints of cider and disappeared into the darkest booth in the quietest corner and he was going to say it but before he could James said, “Lily’s pregnant.” 

“Oh.” 

“Yeah.” 

“What are you — ”

“She’s told her mum.” 

“Have you told — ”

“I haven’t. It’ll be — they _know_ , you know.” 

Lily’s parents did not know there was a war on. James’s parents knew intimately, because his mother had just retired from her position as a head codebreaker at the Ministry; due to her extensive knowledge in this field, and due no doubt to the identity of her son and grandson, she and her husband were kidnapped and executed in Uxbridge in August 1981. It was difficult to fathom how many had died at that juncture and how little death seemed to signify when it was around every corner; Remus had gone to the funeral, but Sirius hadn’t, and Lily alleged privately that nobody there had cried. Not even James had cried. Not even the baby, who cried all the time by Sirius’s estimation, had cried. 

“Well,” said Sirius. 

“You’ll be godfather.” 

“Will I?” 

James fixed him as though this were the mother of all unbreakable contracts. “Yes,” he said. 

They toasted one another’s health with the large gins and downed them. Then they toasted Lily and the baby’s health with the ciders and downed those too. 

How do you know, Sirius nearly asked, when they were well and truly wasted, how do you know that you love her? But he didn’t, indeed he never did, indeed he never really thought about it again; for all intents and purposes it stopped mattering rather quickly… Love struck him, when he was on acid and thought he had the mental faculty to think about it objectively, as a performance of debts and partial balances which could never fully be collected upon due to their abstractness and innumerability. ] 

\--

One day he woke up in a shaft of strange light through the window in a sky so unseasonably jewel-bright he wondered if the world was ending. James and Lily had gone to see their doctor at the FPA but Remus was sitting out on the back patio holding a chipped mug of cold black coffee. He was watching up at the sky with his eyes closed and his mouth just open and he looked raptured, until Sirius sat down beside him, at which point he looked embarrassed. 

“Lovely day.” 

They had not spoken really since the fight. 

“Lovely day,” said Remus. 

James and Lily had nearly brought Remus to the hospital, or so James had said. For a full day they hadn’t let him fall asleep for fear he would never come out of it again. After that they had had no choice but to let him go back out to the church because there were no drugs left in the house anymore but for James’s prescription. Sirius himself had waited, suffering terribly, until his dole check came in at which point he had gone up to Mr. Dumbledore’s. He wondered if Remus had used the dose hidden in the Clash tape. 

“Was going to go see Fletch,” Sirius told him. 

“I haven’t any money.” The perpetual refrain. 

“Well I do.” 

“I can’t ask you to — ”

“Stop it. How’d we — we never used to have any problems. You’ll get me back when your check comes in.” 

They went walking together down to the squat in the old factory where Fenwick had died. “How were your brother’s friends,” said Remus. 

“Evil.” He hardly remembered now and didn’t recall if this was true, which was why he said it anyway. “They’re missing part of their souls. How were your friends.” 

“Much the same.” 

“James and Lily said — ” 

“Yeah. Never have overdosed like that.” 

“Like how?” 

“I could feel it was too much when he gave it to me. Like it came barreling at me but I couldn’t stop it.” He was picking at the hole in the wrist cuff of his sweater with a ragged blood-black fingernail. “I thought I was dead. I thought they were bloody angels.” 

They went down to the factory and waited around a bit for Fletcher with some others who were waiting there. The way things went was that the people you recognized started to disappear and you didn’t know whether they’d quit or died. Dearborn was among the crowd, seated in a too-small child’s lawn chair and tapping his foot to signal to all those assembled that he was fixing and impatient. “Thought you had enough benzos for a lifetime,” said Sirius. 

“Yeah, but that’s benzos… Thanks to this one, anyway.” Remus looked away out the shattered window out onto the sunny street. He was picking embarrassedly at the hole in the sleeve of his sweater again. “You’ve got to talk to Greyback for me, Remus,” Dearborn went on. “He won’t sell anything to me anymore.” 

“Maybe,” said Remus, as though he were addressing the weather. 

Dearborn’s face changed. The handsomeness about it bled into something hawkish and venomous. “You’ve got to — James told me. I saved your bloody useless life and — ”

Luckily Fletcher came in then. Everyone jostled toward him in the entryway like zealots after a saint but Sirius was quickest. Coins were exchanged and he and Remus were back out the door into the sun pocketing the desired goods in a few seconds flat. 

He had missed this, he realized. The intuitive silence of this intimacy. They lay together on the mattress, floating, perfectly high, and watched the clouds move in the sky through the broken window. Remus’s head was on his shoulder and eventually Sirius stroked his hair. He dreamed the apology and it was nearly enough, most of the time. In the morning he got up and made coffee and sat outside on the patio reading a days-old newspaper he’d found in the dumpster behind the supermarket up the road. There was a short, buried article in the International section about a spate of deaths in New York from a strange cancer. Eventually he put the whole paper in the oil drum to be burned next they had a bonfire and he went inside to wake Remus up, but he was already awake. Then, like a cassette tape, it started again from the beginning. 

It went on. They didn’t talk very much because there was very little to talk about. They lay awake with their fears. They wandered around the vacant shells of the buildings at night in search of what was necessary. Remus would leave sometimes for weeks at a time, and when he did Sirius would go down to the bridge, or he would go back up to his parents’ townhouse in Jesmond and shout assorted vitriol on the porch when the butler would not let him in. In February Fletcher was arrested. The person without a face continually neglected to develop a face, and no one else seemed to recognize that perhaps something about this was out of the ordinary. Eventually this person disappeared entirely and, appropriately, no one bothered to notice. 

James held onto sobriety like a delicate, injured bird. With this in hand he reconciled with his parents in Durham; over the course of a weekend whilst Remus was at the church and Sirius at the bridge all of his and Lily’s things quietly disappeared from the house. Sirius came back on Tuesday evening when his money ran out, and, finding this to be true, went to the church with the intent to find Remus for what little measure of commiseration and sympathy Remus was physically capable of doling out. Instead he stood on the steps out front for a while, feeling barred from entry by some invisible gate, and eventually he wandered around back into the overgrown garden, kicking through the snow and the ice dripping from the twisted crabapple tree, and then he walked back home. 

When the tide was going out on him he was spectacularly jealous. Sometimes he wept, not entirely sure why. At last one clear spring morning as he sat on the back patio trying to enumerate on a slip of receipt paper all his acquaintances who had died or were as good as dead he realized he understood why Remus had talked him into shooting up again on the morning after his brother’s funeral. Worse even than the natural state of it was the prospect of doing it alone. 

\--

[ He was aware of the dark mirror. He was aware of nothing else sometimes. How can you stand it, he wanted to ask James, almost did, sometimes, in the shadowy back corners of bleak pubs, how can you stand it, being alive, being in love? Being in part responsible for some other life? For two other lives? 

They came home from whatever they had been assigned to do unwilling and unable to speak about what they had witnessed, never having acquired the necessary vocabulary of blood. He and Remus would sit in the claw-foot bathtub together and smoke a joint and drink an entire bottle of shitty wine and fuck decadently. This is a twisted coping mechanism, Sirius would realize afterward, watching the dawn come into the window with the violence of a symphony tuning up.  
More questions for James, or for god, for the devil, for the poets and philosophers: How can you tell if your love for someone is good or evil? How can you tell if your dependence on someone is healthy or otherwise? How do you know if what you’re feeling is rational? Is love supposed to feel like a desperate, constant pain? Is that a lie culture teaches us? Is it love at all? Is it anything at all? Are we already dying? Are we already dead? Is this hell? 

He was summoned by Patronus (James’s) to St. Mungo’s on the evening of 31 July 1980. Lily had fallen asleep and after a while James perhaps unwisely gave the baby to Sirius to hold. He was so small and red and his eyes weren’t open yet and Sirius could hardly believe he was alive. It just didn’t seem evolutionarily rational for there to exist something so small and helpless. Remus, who had been in Glasgow at a summit of Scottish werewolves, arrived later with a cheap bouquet of wilted flowers, a teddy bear, and a fifth of fine wizarding scotch made in Glencoe. “Careful,” James said, taking a swig of the scotch, “careful, hold his head, they keep saying…” 

“I am holding his head,” said Remus very softly. “I am.” 

James passed Sirius the scotch. Inside Sirius’s head felt like the dishes smashing a minute into the Velvet Underground’s “European Son.” They watched Remus walk with the baby around the room. He was wearing one of Sirius’s old suits which he had fixed a little with magic but which still fit him badly. 

How real might it have ever been? Was any memory inviolable? Could absolute truth be quantified? Because Sirius had chosen to forget about this, about the soft love and awe on Remus’s face, about the warmth and silence, the flowers, Lily snoring, the bright summer night outside the window, he had chosen to incinerate it all, to waste it, as though it had never been, when it had best suited him to believe — 

Then spake the static. ] 

\--

On Thursday Sirius waited around the house, fixing, for Remus to come back with his dole check. At midnight it became clear this was not happening, at which point Sirius further investigated the blue room to find that Remus’s backpack, containing all his earthly possessions, was gone. So too was the army green tin lunchbox containing his works, his walkman, his canvas bag of tapes, and the nicer wool blanket of the two they had found in a dumpster innumerable helical iterations of doses and dole checks ago. 

This was an untenable betrayal outweighing even every time Remus had withheld drugs from him. Sirius cursed his name to all known gods and vowed revenge. Eventually he went out onto the back patio and vomited mostly acid. Galvanized by the brutal gutting sharpness of the longing and the anger in tandem, he stormed the church like an avenging Crusader army consisting of a single man. The sacristy behind the altar was empty. He checked every sleeping body in the crypt but recognized none of them. It was nearly dawn when he made it down to the bridge, but no one there would give him anything because he had no money. So, shaking apart, he took the bus up to Jesmond to go to Mr. Dumbledore’s. On the way he tried to throw a stone through the window of his childhood bedroom but had so little strength the projectile barely made it over the high, ungroomed boxwood hedge. 

Mr. Dumbledore was in his dressing gown boiling eggs and he looked exceedingly tired when he came to the door. “What a pleasant surprise,” he said, though his tone indicated otherwise. “Do come in…” 

“Have you seen Remus?” 

“Did you check the church?” 

“Yeah. He’s not there. All his things are gone.” 

Mr. Dumbledore bade Sirius sit in the living room and brought a cup of tea and a sleeve of biscuits and one of the freshly boiled eggs. At long, excruciating last he produced from his pocket one of the small white oxycodone tablets which he gave to Sirius with some seeming chagrin. “Was Greyback there?” he asked. 

“I don’t even know what he looks like.” 

“Big man. Grey beard — ”

“I didn’t see him.” 

“He moves sometimes,” said Mr. Dumbledore thoughtfully. 

“Would Remus go with him?” 

Mr. Dumbledore watched out the window as the paperboy threw a bundle of no-doubt-dire news upon the stoop. “He has before,” he said at last. 

“When?” 

“Up here from Leeds. I thought you knew.” 

“I don’t know anything,” Sirius said, though he had suspected this. He realized belatedly he was practically shouting. “I don’t know bloody anything at all.” 

Finally he curled up in the armchair, further dirtying the stained chintz with his filthy boots, and wept. He ignored Mr. Dumbledore’s attempt at comfort until at last he left the room, presumably to boil more eggs. It was a bad high; the pill was only powerful enough to marginally quell some of his withdrawal symptoms, and otherwise it only served to make him anxious. He was quite certain now he was utterly alone. In a little while Mr. Dumbledore came back in. He had prepared a dose of fine amber liquid in a syringe which he held out as a sort of peace offering, like one might offer a bit of sausage to a dog. “Can you collect yourself,” he said gently. 

Sirius wiped the tears and snot from his face with the back of his sleeve. 

“He’ll be back,” Mr. Dumbledore said. He used his belt to make a tourniquet around Sirius’s upper arm. “How long have you known him? He needs you too. He’ll be back.” 

It sounded wishful, Sirius realized. And he did not quite understand how long. Years — three years? Four years? 

[ Time dissolved. Time boiled off and evaporated as liquid bubbling in a spoon. Time was like thin paper that could be torn or folded or otherwise it was like a bad film. Static. It could go on and on repeating itself into incomprehensible infinity. The worst was the vague understanding that perhaps it had been like this even before. ] 

He closed his eyes like a child might so as not to watch the injection. 

He stayed up there some days until his own dole check came. This he cashed, took down under the bridge, and spent in a week. Someone there said Fletcher had gotten out of prison, or perhaps someone else had set up shop in the old factory. There were lights there at night again, moving in the old buildings; he sometimes remembered the ghosts he had imagined on the moor as a child. When he dragged himself up the path toward the street practically on his hands and knees he had an inkling he would go there just to see what the fuss was all about. But on the way he was obliged to walk past the house, and Remus was there on the back patio smoking a cigarette. 

Sirius might’ve fallen to his knees and kissed Remus’s feet. But then he remembered he had vowed revenge. This was compounded by the fact that Remus was wearing unfamiliar clothes. His hair was clean and had been cut neatly in a way that might flatter his face were it not skeletal. “I was about to go,” he said. He twisted the butt of the cigarette out under the toe of his shoe. 

“Why didn’t you?” 

“I needed to talk to you.” 

“Yeah, well you might’ve before you left.” 

“I should’ve,” said Remus. He was staring intently at the smear of ash the cigarette had left against the concrete, as though it contained minute galaxies or runic messaging. “I am sorry.” 

It was the only verbal apology Sirius could remember him ever expressing in all their acquaintance. It was so powerfully shocking he began to consider a horrible inkling. “You haven’t,” he said, but it stuck in his throat and he couldn’t go on. 

“I haven’t what.” 

“You’ve — Remus. Have you — ” 

“I haven’t had any,” Remus said, slowly, very quietly, “in a fortnight, no.” 

In the silence there was a bird singing. Remus fumbled in the pocket of his jacket and Sirius could see his hands were shaking. He produced his pack of cheap cigarettes and a polaroid photograph, which he handed to Sirius. It was a picture of a baby mid-squirm amidst an ecstasy of yellow knits. “Your godson,” said Remus. “Do you want a cigarette?” 

Sirius didn’t say anything. He was studying the baby as though the image might move if he looked away. 

“His name is Harry,” Remus said, lighting his cigarette. “I’ve been staying with James and Lily. They’ve a flat in a council estate in Darlington now.” 

Sirius’s own voice sounded dull and cold as a knife. “Have they.” 

“Yeah. James works in a grocer’s.” 

“Does he.” 

“I’ve the money for two train tickets back — ”

So help him he couldn’t stand this saccharine route of conversation any longer. If it was going to be a knife he’d rather it was a sharp one. “Why,” he asked Remus. His voice was too loud and the word echoed just so in the filthy concrete yard like a shattering of glass. 

“Why what?” 

“Why did you quit?” 

For a moment Remus simply watched the cigarette burn. The ash, the paper atomizing. The breeze snatched the ember and blew it harmlessly to the ground, where it extinguished in a way that perhaps had metaphoric significance. “I couldn’t stand it anymore,” Remus said finally. 

“Couldn’t stand what?” 

“I wanted to feel something else,” Remus went on, choosing words carefully so as not to offend. “Anything else. I’ve had — it’s been nearly half of my life like this with every bloody day the same. I wanted — needed to see what was real.” 

Sirius scoffed. As though he had not wondered this himself over and over at some regular nadir in the cycle of it. “What is, then.” 

“I’ve missed you desperately,” said Remus, searching away across the lot for the bird that was singing. 

Quite simply it was impossible that this was the truth. “It’s the drugs you miss,” Sirius told him. 

“It isn’t.” 

“It’s what I missed,” said Sirius, aware he was being cruel. “After my brother’s funeral.” 

Remus flinched. “I’m sorry,” he said again, “I am, it was, you know, unconscionable, but I couldn’t stand to think it would — to be alone.” 

“Well that’s precisely where you’ve bloody left me.” 

“I don’t want to. It kills me. I can remember how it felt when I thought you had gone. I won’t — I can’t stand to leave you here. For the love of god you’ve got to come with me. We can help you, and — ” 

“You can’t.” 

“What?” 

“You can’t help me.” 

“Why the bloody hell not?” 

“I don’t need your help. I don’t want it.” 

Remus snatched the polaroid photograph of the baby out of Sirius’s grasp and stood. Visible now in the pale overcast light with the tide going out were the other secret proofs he had shed the mantle he’d worn their entire acquaintance. His eyes were very bright and the plainness of emotion upon his face almost unbearable to look at. Like an incredibly beautiful painting or like the face of god. Sirius looked past him across the yard. The bird that was singing was perched one-footed on a telephone wire. The shape of it looked like a black cutout against the bright grey sky. 

At last Remus brushed past him and into the house and after a few moments Sirius heard the front door slam. “How fucking ridiculous,” Sirius announced to no one. Perhaps to the bird. “The hypocritical fucking fuck.” Eventually he realized he was crying. And shortly after that he recalled Remus had said he had enough money with him for two train tickets. 

He got to his feet, shakily when his vision turned black, and ran through the house and out the front door. Remus would give him the money, he reasoned; it was rightfully his anyway, and after all he had personally bought enough heroin for Remus to have replaced the entire quantity of morphine used in Vietnam, and anyway Remus owed him, and Remus would never stop owing him, though when he thought too deeply about this he couldn’t be certain exactly what for. He ran all the way to the train station feeling like a rabid animal, foaming at the mouth, fueled by longing and a confused, embarrassed rage, and arrived in time to watch the 3:21 to Leeds pull away out of the dark sooty yard and over the river into infinity. 

\--

[ Every time felt like the last time. Every chance like the last chance. It kept happening again and again and eventually Sirius wondered if this was some brilliant form of mental torture conceptualized by the enemy to weaken their defenses. Later, of course, in the prison, he would understand this to be true. It reminded him of the way ballet dancers practiced the same minuscule movement for hours on end to strengthen the muscle, but it didn’t seem to strengthen anything at all. Every time it hurt the same. They would wander together in the gardens in Regents’ Park or on the beach in Margate, where James’s parents were briefly living in the summer home of former colleagues. Lily carried the baby in a backpack and he would reach over and pull Sirius’s hair with his small sticky hands. James had gone so far as to go to a Muggle doctor to get medicine to help him sleep, because pot was making him paranoid and he felt guilty drinking around the baby. 

They embraced on the train platform. “See you soon,” said Lily. 

“Yeah. See you soon.” 

In September waking in the field at first he forgot where he was. Then he remembered. Beside him Remus had sat up holding his knees to his chest. There was a bloody bite mark inside his collar. “It’ll rain,” he said, watching at the sky. 

They found their clothes and dressed and walked together out to the road in a silence which had been wounded months previous and had long since begun to fester. Worms were working in it, in the silence. It was such a severe wound and so rotted the entire limb would have to be cut off or death would come of it. Yet they had avoided this necessary amputation because it could not be certain if death would be worse than living without this limb, especially considering the caveat that living incontrovertibly included the war. After a while they were so exhausted from running in the night and so unwilling to return to London that they Apparated to Dover and found a dingy cafe for breakfast. After a while Remus got up and went to the restroom to clean the wound inside his collar. Sirius watched through the wide windows painted in bright colors offering breakfast specials as the storm blew into town and swept violently through the street. Eventually a man ran by against the wind holding his hat before his face to absolutely no avail. 

Remus came back from the bathroom and the waitress brought greasy egg sandwiches and enamel mugs of burnt black coffee. They ate quickly and went out into the rain and walked in the street beneath the high chalk cliff. The storm passed over but the sky was still grey. After a while they found a bed and breakfast and Sirius went inside and rented a room and Remus came around back and climbed up the fire escape. They were there for all of an hour before they fought so explosively Sirius got his wand out and felt at last that with it he could summon the will to perform any number of unforgivable acts. Finally he left and went down to the water. There were tourists pouring off a cruise ship docked at one of the long piers protecting the harbor and he wondered about the contentment of their lives with envy and disgust. He watched another storm moving across the channel praying it might come to shore and wash everything away. Instead it moved continually to the west toward Dungeness dragging itself apart into the deep and swallowing black water. 

He thought, turning for home, for whatever was left, that because he had had so many, he might have another chance after that. Of course, he did not. ] 

\--

The cassette tape turned over and played from the beginning. He had the sense sometimes, lying on the mattress in the blue room or on cold concrete under the bridge, that the substance of reality itself was rotting away, and that the world existed only by the grace and strength of his will. And yet eventually, as ever, the dream came back. He woke up on the kitchen floor to find that Remus was sitting at the table. 

[ _“What is that noise?” The wind under the door._ ] 

He got to his feet. The world jolted and shuddered static. Remus had pushed all Sirius’s works away from himself across the table so that the pale pink depression glass mug of sharps was perilously close to falling onto the filthy tiles. He wore a hideous brown suit with mismatched shoes and belt and a red and gold tie which was undone and did not cover the coffee stain on his button-up shirt. The something else unfamiliar about him was some manifestation of his self that Sirius had never known. And yet he was certain, somehow, impossibly, that all this had happened before. 

[ He thought sometimes, who are you? Which is the person I do not know? Is there something else watching out at me through your eyes? And if there is who put it there? Did I put it there? ] 

He sat down across from Remus at the table and began to prepare the last dose in the tinfoil packet sold to him by Fletcher in the factory a few days previous. Again contributing to the overwhelming air that this was but another station in the cyclical movement of time, this all seemed the same as it had been for years except Remus watched him now with a little cold pity filtered through the jealous longing. 

“I’m not coming back with you,” Sirius said, drawing the liquid up into a syringe. “I told you I don’t need — ” 

“That’s not what — ”

“Then what. Why the fuck would you bloody stoop to come here?”

“They’re dead,” Remus said bluntly. Slowly, as to a child: “James and Lily are dead. Tuesday. Some pile-up on the M1.” 

[ Like ice — he woke from a dream — 

He flinched away from that memory, from the truth. But it came back round on him again with knives. ] 

“They won’t,” Remus tried; his voice was soft and wild with fear; “the baby, they won’t, I have no bloody legal claim, they said, his — ” 

“I can’t,” said Sirius, “holy god, I bloody can’t.” 

He put the syringe down on the table and it rolled point-first onto the floor. His heart was yearning out of his throat. 

“You think I bloody can?” Remus asked. He was leaning forward over the table as though he was sharing a secret. Not long ago, Sirius realized, he had been crying; perhaps on the train. He would’ve done it someplace secret like the tiny cubicle toilets. Afterward he might’ve splashed his face with water and taken measured breaths. Ignored the pounding upon the door. Yearned desperately for a dose or some other chemical distraction. Then he would’ve gone quietly back to his seat and read either one of his Joyce novels or passages from his tiny onionskin Bible. “Christ,” he went on, “I haven’t got a job. I dropped out of year nine. I’ve a bloody arrest record.” 

“I’m not any more qualified than you are to, to raise a child!”

“Will it kill you to try. We owe it to them to try, after all they did — ”

“Why?” 

“ _What_?” 

“Why try?” 

[ There wasn’t any — no reason. Nothing to do, nowhere to go but under. ] 

Remus stood. His chair grated on the floor in a frequency that drove a railroad spike through Sirius’s skull. He had nicked his jaw shaving and hadn’t noticed the blood-bright poppy bloom like a red birthmark against his skin and the wilted collar of his shirt. When he spoke his voice was bitter and incredulous, louder perhaps than Sirius ever heard him speak, and seemed to come from somewhere behind him: “You don’t remember?” 

“I don’t — ”

“You have to bloody remember. You fucking idiot. It’s all yours now.” 

Even now it separated like milk and cream. The substance of this world itself, at long last, was slipping off the edge of the false map. It seemed to melt around him like wax, even the sound. It was only himself and Remus now in the room outside of which was nothing. The sea — the birds. The same ever-present indiscriminate orchestra of weeping. For a moment he entertained he had taken too big a dose and this was death. But the syringe had rolled to a rest against the moulding in the corner of the kitchen floor. 

“What’s all — what is — ”

“I thought you didn’t want my fucking help.” 

He might’ve gone to his knees at Remus’s feet and wept, abject. “I need it,” he said, sobbing, terrified, adrift now, only darkness, like a bad overdose, worse, draining off, draining his life off, “I need, please, help me.” 

“You’re his bloody godfather,” Remus said, “do you remember?” 

He recalled with the force of nightmare that it had been the happiest moment of his life. Autumn in Camden. He could no longer fault James for his foolishness. Everything felt possessed by love. And someone trusted him with their entire soul. He knew then he would not squander it. To do so would be unforgivable treason. 

“You’ve got to pull it together,” Remus went on. “Whatever happens to him now is your bloody responsibility. Do you remember?” The voice was falling away now, with everything else, like the floors of a burning house. From nothing it came again, calling forth from the back of the great void: “Do you remember?” 

“Yes — yes.” 

[ He opened his eyes into the black room squinting as though just born. He was alone there in the colorless day. “Yes,” he said aloud to no one. ]

\--

[ It had been so long he did not recognize himself by touch or the reflection of his face in a puddle of rainwater on the floor. With the sharp edge of the spoon he cut his hair and beard. There was a little ink still in the well in the stone floor. Most of it had been tapped under his skin in patterns or in words. One of them was a large black dog, and on his thigh was a twisted rendition of the prison with which he had marked himself in another life. Unfolding up the inside his forearm was a lunar chart, and beside this on the side of his wrist he located a swath of undisturbed skin. It took him about twenty minutes to tap the reminder into his veins with all the poison blood: MY GODSON. He remembered something else once he had finished and examined the back of his wrist for free space, but he had already tattooed there at some entirely lost juncture the other false memory: PSALM 137. ]


	5. Chapter 5

In the morning he woke early before his shift and walked up the hill to the castle. There was no haze yet so from the top of the hill and the old ramparts one could see over the red terracotta roofs of the old town through the long valley along the river like a sleeping copper snake. He had a cigarette and walked down the hill another route so as to say good morning to the black dog and the girl who owned the black dog. She spoke no English and he had a private notion she was a lesbian, but he was trying to ingratiate himself via the dog just in case. Neither of them were outside so he went down through the tangled dawn-lit sleeping streets to the cafe for three espressos two of which he downed and the third of which he carried back up the cobbled hill toward home, where Remus was out on the front steps in his dressing gown having a smoke and runny scrambled eggs. 

“There’s more on the hotplate,” he said, accepting the espresso. 

“How’s it then?” 

“Fine. Broadcasting. We’ve got to change the signal tonight at twenty-one hundred hours.” 

“To what?” 

“You’ll see. It’s on the table down in the studio.” 

He went inside for eggs. Into the cast iron skillet Remus had diced a bit of salami and shaved white flakes of a salty local cheese. He had somehow managed to befriend more locals than Sirius had in their tenure, including the cheesemonger, the butcher, and the greengrocer, though he had even less Italian than Sirius did and something was messed up about his head from Korea. Sirius had jealously figured this made him more sympathetic to elderly folk who themselves recalled the Second World War and a very different variety of menacing socialism. 

The house was set back artfully into a hillside. Though the inside was pristine, bathed with sun in the mornings, blue drapery and light wood furnishings softening the light against the whitewashed wood shelves and Mediterranean tile floors, outside the ancient stucco was stained with sun and rain and the growth of a thick black ivy against the structure which had climbed to the roof, and which frequently they were forced to maintain so it did not overgrow the transmitter. It had successfully overgrown a shambling, half-collapsed trellis in the back, abutting the hill, and a medieval stone wall, hanging thick shade over a heaving slate patio and a wrought-iron table and chairs at which they frequently drank wine and espresso and smoked cigarettes and ate crusty bread and cheese and olives and salami, Sirius’s bastardized panzanella the next day, eggs so fresh they were still warm, and salted fish shipped upvalley from the gulf, and drank cheveux du chien with tomato juice and a drop of the precious imported Worcestershire some mornings, when the wines had been too various. It had all seemed at first like a decadent Italian vacation and particularly Remus had treated it like a dream which might tear at its seams if forced. Eventually, however, it became clear it would not be ending anytime soon — that they were trapped in this dream — and the wine consumption skyrocketed, as did the cheveux du chien; they walked every trail on the back property, didn’t (couldn’t) speak sometimes for days, listened to the radio, befriended the townsfolk, who thought they were cousins and expatriate novelists, tried to learn Italian, made extravagant meals, smoked bad cigarettes, fought once or twice explosively when drunk, because Remus couldn’t be riled whatsoever when sober, due possibly to his MI6 training; they read old novels, listened to opera on vinyl purchased an hour’s bicycle ride south through the valley, once or twice attempted poetry or painting, groomed the ivy, scaled the cliff and jumped down until Sirius twisted his ankle so badly he couldn’t walk for days. And, when instructed, changed the transmission on the equipment in the basement. 

The station broadcast a series of numbers produced through a speech synthesis program. This series of numbers was bookended by a series of tones mimicking that of the folk song “Scarborough Fair.” In all the series was broadcast twice an hour, on the ’18 and the ’48 unless otherwise instructed. Occasionally, on the instruction of appropriate visitors or messages received via post or a tinny, out-of-date two-way radio also located in the basement studio, the series of numbers was reprogrammed to something new. They very often wondered if anyone was listening, though they were assured by the visitors that people were, and in fact these people were important people doing important work, though neither they nor this work could be named. The equipment was of fine quality and the transmitter was powerful and yet they had both been tapped to man the station due to a moderate facility with technological repair. After storms they would climb up onto the roof by way of the drainpipes and clear the fallen branches and leaves away from the transmitter. Eventually Remus had built a kind of lean-to to conceal and protect it; he had grown up on a goat farm near Exeter and had a surprising quantity of odd skills. It was also warm enough that he elected to work in an undershirt, which rendered Sirius unable to sleep for some reason. 

They were never told precisely what the station was for, but it was rather obvious with but middling knowledge of radio operations and world politics. The transmitter broadcast at 100,000 watts, which would reach just beyond Moscow on a good day, though on a very good day (taking into account weather, sunspots, RF noise, etc.) it might’ve reached as far as Perm. It would also be detectable throughout Europe and much of North Africa. Spies could be given one-time pads and the numbers stations served as the necessary keys to decrypt the coded messages. Sirius had trained to be in MI6 but they had found his family history suspect (he was a tangential Habsburg) and he had failed a psychological exam for undisclosed reasons. It wasn’t quite as embarrassing as what he’d gleaned had happened to Remus, who had carried out a mission or two in Korea and had subsequently had some kind of nervous breakdown. Whenever the visitors came with new codes and instructions it seemed both of them held out hope they would be assigned to some other mission, but this had yet to come to fruition. 

The basement room in which the equipment was kept appeared to have been excavated out of the vivid red clay with bare hands. Some now-inconceivable time previous they had arrived in town by separate trains to find everything already assembled by an invisible architect. Its sense of kitsch was most surprising: the setup included a very antique radio with which one could listen to what the station itself and those nearby were broadcasting, which meant usually old operas and folk songs, but occasionally they heard other numbers stations crackling over the airwaves, at uncertain distances, of uncertain origins. Remus had a little Russian and would transcribe when he could; slips of paper inscribed with his effortful Cyrillic text littered the surfaces and blew into the corners. Otherwise the radio played propaganda, speeches, the nightly BBC world service which instilled in them aching and silent homesickness, French radio broadcasting abstract jazz… 

Otherwise the setup was simple and utilitarian: the speech synthesis computer they used to create the transmissions, a mixing board, and, in the corner, the two-way radio with which they were occasionally contacted by those who oversaw the project, and which they were meant to use to warn their superiors in case of an unspecified “emergency.” They were aware, also, that there was some variety of alarm webbed into the mix; Remus had pointed it out to him, because it had never sounded. It would, apparently, if the broadcast was in any way interrupted or compromised. 

Sirius put the radio on and found a station out of Albenga that broadcast everything from opera to jazz to American big-band music and turned the volume up high and sat down with the eggs. The needle was moving joltily on the mixing board showing that their own station was partway through one of its half-hourly transmissions. Beside it on the plywood table reinforced with a few buckling sawhorses was a slip of paper on which Remus had copied down the transmission they were meant to begin at twenty-one-hundred hours:  
_2 5 0 0 8 — 6 4 9 7 3 — 9 9 0 0 7 — 6 5 7 9 1 — 1 3 3 8 2 — 7 0 5 8 2 — end_

Sirius had left his book there the evening previous; by some miracle he had found an English copy of _Manhattan Transfer_ at a shop upvalley in Erli, no doubt left there by a tourist; he didn’t like the book much, but there was nothing else to do. Sometimes he wondered how long they would be there and sometimes he wondered how long they had already been there. He didn’t quite remember, probably as a function of the drinking, which was almost certainly why he couldn’t imagine an end to it. Just as he could not imagine an end to this cold war. 

\--

At five or so he smelled food cooking and a little over an hour later Remus came down with a glass of deep red wine in an old jam jar. This he pressed into Sirius’s hand, and Sirius folded his page over in _Manhattan Transfer._ “I made a lamb shank,” Remus said. He had gotten quite good at cooking by starting small and perfecting easy recipes before moving on. Once or twice he had prepared spicy rice dishes he’d evidently learned in Korea. Otherwise he taught himself out of old Italian cookbooks unearthed at the secondhand bookstore in town, or he prepared bastardized variations of dishes explained to him very slowly in muddled Italian and English by the townspeople. “There’s good bread too and a tomato salad,” Remus went on. “Just don’t let me forget to change the transmission at twenty-one-hundred hours.” 

“I won’t forget.” 

They climbed the stairs together into the back garden. Remus was barefoot. The sun was coming thickly in golden rays through the ivy and shifting in the breeze through the valley, smelling like the river and dinner and wine, the end of the summer… 

In however long it had been they had bred some kind of separate peace between each other meticulously. They were almost wildly different sorts of people with more similarities between them than either would care to admit. It was mostly the things they hated about each other that they had in common, which of course was the heart of the matter. They had elected not to discuss most things, including but not limited to: Sirius’s family, whatever had happened to Remus in Korea, either of their MI6 training, women, relationships, politics, or popular music. This limited most conversation to gossip about people they both knew, though it was never discussed how precisely they knew these people, jazz, classical music, poetry, modern art, history (though this could be touchy, because it involved politics), and the particulars of the job at hand. And food, and wine, which was easiest, because it was customarily in direct correlation with these things that they spoke at all. 

Hence: “How was the radio,” said Remus. He had laid the food out on the wrought-iron table (they had wedged a piece of broken tile under one crooked leg to keep it from tipping) on the fine clay dishes, painted with colorful pastoral scenes, that Sirius had long ago found at the secondhand store in the further isolated valley that paralleled theirs. One of the visitors had come long ago and taken them in a new Cadillac to purchase necessities, because they had been eating with their fingers out of pots and pans. So that must have been at the beginning of it — quite a shame he could not remember… 

“They played like half the Ring Cycle,” Sirius told him, “on the transmission out of Albenga. At least I think it was the Ring Cycle.” 

“Did it sound Teutonic?” 

“Oh, yes.” 

“We went to go see it in London years ago,” said Remus. Sirius knew better than to ask him about _we_. “I fell asleep.” 

They ate. Drank. Continually drank. The sun sank lower down the valley dragging the light with it by increments. The conversation wandered but eventually turned back to music. Remus told him about a radio station he’d found a few nights previous which played old American blues songs. Sirius didn’t believe such a thing existed. “It does,” Remus said, topping off his glass of wine, “I heard it.” 

“Well what was it playing?” 

“You know that old song ‘Midnight Special’… that’s the only one I knew. Maybe they only play it at night.” 

“What would anyone be doing playing delta blues in rural Italy? You must’ve been hallucinating.” 

Remus half-stood to top off Sirius’s jam jar of wine as well. “You’re the one who falls asleep on shift.” 

“That was one time.” 

“Besides you can hear AM stations from around the world,” Remus went on, ignoring him, “contingent on sunspots, RF noise…” 

“Well I know that.” 

“Perhaps it was just beamed through the atmosphere then from America.” 

Sirius was just drunk enough to prefer argument to rational thinking but it seemed this subject had been exhausted. “Who did you go see the Ring Cycle with in London?” 

He didn’t think Remus would answer but was swiftly proven wrong: “James Potter. Do you remember him? He was — ” 

“Yeah. A data analyst, I remember.” 

“He had an extra ticket,” said Remus. “Lily cancelled for some reason or another.” 

“So you knew Lily too?” Remus nodded. They would not, Sirius understood, discuss how. “They had this friend I met a few times,” Sirius said. It was nearly full dark now and the moths were shifting around the gaslight by the crooked stairs into the kitchen. The moonlight dappled through the overhanging ivy and the night insects were almost deafening. The Italian night had always felt to him like a sort of alternate world in which certain things might be vocalized which must otherwise be condemned to a secure vault for permanent secrecy. “They had this friend,” Sirius went on. “I don’t know if you remember — ”

Remus said a name but it left Sirius’s mind as quickly as it came in. 

“I don’t remember. He just never seemed — I can’t recall his face.” 

“It wasn’t really a memorable face,” Remus said. “I don’t know where he is now. I don’t think he’s in this line of work anymore.” 

“Do you know why?” 

“Why does anyone leave? Your nerves get worn down to floss by the time you’re thirty.” 

He almost asked Remus, how old are you? Then he wondered how old he himself was. They carried the dishes inside and piled them into the sink; that done, they ripped off chunks of fresh crusty bread to drag around the sauce still sitting in the skillet on the stove in which Remus had cooked the lamb shank. Then they took another dusty bottle of wine out to the garden. 

“They’re abroad now,” Remus said, wrestling the cork out of the bottle. “James and Lily.” 

Sirius understood what he meant by _abroad_. Perhaps they were the very ones who would tune in tonight from Moscow or Perm to listen to the new transmission. “Suited for it,” Sirius said. 

“You think so?”

“As much as anyone is suited for it. I don’t know. They both always struck me as pretty unflappable.” 

“Someone said once,” Remus told him, lowering his voice, even though the nearest house was abandoned, and the second-nearest was about a half-mile away, “it’s all about, really, just knowing how to control your heart rate.” 

“I think you have to be a bit of a psychopath. Or you have to know when you can put your empathy on the back burner.” 

“It’s the latter,” Remus said. “Because other sorts of times you need it — empathy I mean.” 

“It always seemed to me like it would be useless at war. Even dangerous.” 

“You haven’t been to war, Black.” 

He called Sirius by his last name when he was feeling terse, which was his default state of feeling whenever Sirius made any kind of malformed assumption about what it was like to be at war. Usually when this happened Sirius reminded him that they were presently at war. This isn't a real war, Remus would sometimes say. Of course, about this point Sirius could not argue, never having experienced firsthand any other variety of war. 

“It’s useful to understand one’s enemy,” Remus said. “I should’ve thought that might be obvious.” 

“Well it’s one thing — ”

“We shouldn’t talk about it anymore.” 

Most conversations ended this way. “Fine,” he said. 

Eventually Remus went inside to change the transmission. Sirius listened to the crickets. A car appeared over the west rise on the winding road through the valley and he watched the angular shape the headlights threw over the trees and the hills and the buildings contort until it disappeared again. When it did he found the wine bottle empty and went inside to get another one. Remus was in the kitchen finishing the sauce in the skillet with a tear of bread. 

“Did you change — ”

“Yeah.” 

This bottle they opened at the kitchen table and drank without glasses, passing it back and forth between each other. 

“How long have we been here,” he dared to ask after a while. 

[ Ten years, said his own voice, the most waking voice inside his own mind, from the distant crypt. ]

“You know I don’t remember either.” 

“Consequence of every day being much the same I suppose.” 

“I suppose. It’ll be autumn again soon.” 

“Will it?” 

“I think so.” 

The winters here were strange. He could scarcely remember. Hungover as sin, he went out in the morning suffering immensely in the blinding jewel light off the snow to pour a bit of precious maple syrup into the ice and make a sweet frozen candy. 

“What are we going to do then?” 

“The same.” 

“And then?” 

Remus leant precariously on the back two legs of the rickety chair. “The same,” he said again. 

Sirius stepped on the crossbeam between the front chair legs to pull it back down to the floor and when it landed with a jolt he had already dove forward to press his mouth against Remus’s shocked mouth, just to catalyze something, anything, different. 

He thought it had happened twice or thrice before. In some ways it was bound to, as a consequence of alcohol and isolation. It was unclear if either of them really enjoyed it beyond obvious physical reactivity, and they never spoke about it, because it had never gone far enough to necessitate any kind of metaphoric or literal nakedness. Sirius had privately thought that if it ever did they might be in bad trouble. 

They stood and kissed against the cooker which was still warm. Remus tasted like canned tomatoes and wine. Sirius touched his belly through the broken button at his untucked shirttails and he jolted like a dying fish. Something drove like a railroad spike between them, as if they were opposingly electrified, and they stood apart for a moment, looking past each other’s shoulders pointedly. “Are you going to take me to bed,” Remus said at last. 

“I thought you didn’t — ”

“Well I do. Why would you think that?” 

“Just — nevermind.” 

They finished the bottle of wine and then they went. The house was swimming. Down in the basement Sirius heard the humming of the machines as a heartbeat or a lullaby. He put the light on in his room and Remus turned it off. “Don’t say anything,” he said. 

The moonlight through the window was painted all over everything in an eerie slate-grey blue reminiscent of a dream or a tomb. 

“What?” 

“Just don’t.” 

He sat on the edge of the bed. Remus stood in the shaft of light through the window and undressed. Now Sirius understood why he had asked for silence. He reached forward and grabbed Remus by the hip and pressed his open mouth against the worst of the old scars. 

“What do you want,” Sirius asked him. 

He wasn’t quite sure what exactly he was asking. “I don’t know,” Remus said. “Something.” 

\--

[ The dream he had over and over in the end was borrowed from a partial reality from June 1979, when he had been summoned to the Ministry to identify a body, only to find that Dumbledore was already there. He had not heard from Remus in two days and feared the worst. They were still in the sort of honeymoon phase of it then and on the Tube he allowed himself to entertain any number of gory fantasies, including Apparating directly to Hogwarts (he knew this was impossible) and killing the old man and then himself with a giant historic sword. This turned out to be unnecessary, because Dumbledore was at the morgue already and the corpse belonged to an Order informant, a potionmaker, Goldstein. Sirius had known him well but even by this juncture felt the blow of loss a great deal more minimally than he once had. 

In the dream the old man hovered over the slab. The identity of the corpse revolved. At first usually it was Remus. Then James or Lily. Once or twice it was the baby. Sometimes it had no face at all. 

Like an overgrown bat Dumbledore crossed the room in a grand sweep of his robes and his traveling cloak. “Do you know who it is?” 

He couldn’t speak through the unfamiliar and indeed at this juncture unrealistic onslaught of emotion. The old man grabbed his shoulder tightly enough to hurt and shoved him across the silent room toward the slab. “Do you know who it is!” 

“Yes — yes — I — ” 

“Tell me who it is,” the old man shouted in his ear, all around him. He had grasped the back of Sirius’s neck so tightly he could feel the ridge of a sharp fingernail press under his skin. And Sirius beheld the open dead eyes and mouth — the color which was going wherever the life had gone to some other place where it could not be brought back the same again though the mortician would doggedly try. Sometimes there was a wound but usually not. The old man shoved him closer still to the body, so close sometimes he could feel the chill coming off it. “Tell me,” he said, venomously softly, the way he would sound hovering imperiously outside Sirius’s cell in the basement of the Ministry many years later, “tell me who it is.” 

He found in the final throes of it the worst horror of all which was that he could not recall the name. And then — ] 

\--

— the alarm went off. It seized his [ old, war-trained ] mind by the back of it and jerked him into sudden and painful consciousness. His mouth was dry and ash-tasting with last night’s wine, and the late summer late morning in the window was a peaceful golden, like the inside of a peach, spread across the ancient terracotta roofs of the town and up into the flanking hills where it saturated in the pale pockmarked stone. The light upon the bed — the white cotton sheets, a handmade quilt thrown aside in the night heat — was filtered in abstract shapes through the blown-glass windows, and the person who had shared it with him in the night was already on his feet and wrestling into his inside-out shirt. Even through the throbbing bruise of the hangover and the shock of being roused so suddenly by the blaring noise it did not entirely surprise him that this person was Remus. But very quickly, like a shadow, he was out the door, footsteps percussive on the stairs to the basement. He had managed to kill the alarm before Sirius could even pull it together enough to get up and get his pants on. 

Going down to the basement felt like walking a kind of gauntlet to his own death by guillotine or stoning. “Someone’s broadcasting on our frequency,” said Remus calmly, not turning around, when he heard Sirius’s footsteps on the stairs. He was bare-assed in his oversize shirt and there was a purple bite mark at the join of his thigh. 

Sirius was so hungover that he could not even summon surprise with which to react to this news. “What can we do?” 

“Literally nothing.” 

“But — ”

Remus turned toward him in the stairs. Christ but there was a bruise on his neck too just visible inside his shirt in the long thick shadows. Sirius’s knees felt weak. “This person could be anywhere in the hemisphere,” he said. “And by the sound of it they have a more powerful transmitter than us.” 

“By the sound of what?” 

Remus reached up and turned the old radio on. The numbers had been replaced by English words mangled through a speech synthesis program similar to their own: 

_— frightened beyond fear, horrified past horror, calm. Nothing was real for, I thought, now, when I like, I can wake up and end the dream —_

[ It seized him by the base of the spine by the light and the sea splintering through his eyelids and the incorrigible cold of the stone floor in which he lay like a supplicant and had been lying now for untold years and for a moment with a foot in both worlds he understood there was only one dream. But as ever finding this reality unbearable he doggedly focused back into the false one until the real dissolved. ] 

“We just changed the transmission last night,” said Sirius. 

“Yes. It’s only supposed to air until today at three. A short one — orders of some consequence.” 

“Someone doesn’t want our spies to hear it.” 

“Yes, evidently.”

“So it must be the reds then.” 

“I thought that,” said Remus. He sat heavily in the creaking swivel chair. There was another bite mark inside his thigh, bright and sweet as spilt wine (which itself was the color that had stained one of his shirttails). “But why block just the one transmission?” 

“Unless they knew what it was.” 

“Yeah.” 

Sirius reached up and tuned the radio away from the eerie transmission, settling on a station they listened to often, out of Nice, which played contemplative abstract jazz. “They just don’t do things like this,” he realized aloud. “The reds.” 

“They don’t,” Remus agreed.

“And besides how would they have known. Why now, when we’ve been on air for — ” 

“The content of the message. Like I said.” 

“They couldn’t’ve gotten a pad — ”

“Damn you,” Remus said. He sat up in the chair, fixing Sirius with cold eyes. “Think. Occam’s Razor. Who has the content of the messages? Who has a more powerful transmitter?” 

“You’re not suggesting — ”

“I am suggesting.” 

They watched each other in a wary silence for a long moment. On the radio the French jazz wandered through time signatures like a drunk. Sirius’s hangover had sunk entirely into his stomach and calcified in a painful black knot of nausea. 

“Did you fail your psych exam,” said Remus suddenly. 

“What?” 

Remus looked across the room into the mess of skeletal leaves and paper scraps in a corner. Sirius felt the blood drain from his face. “I did too,” Remus said at last. 

“But you were in — ”

“I failed the one when I got back. Which is why I’m here and not abroad.” 

“What happened?” 

“You saw,” Remus said. “Were you that drunk?” 

“No,” Sirius told him defensively. The truth was he hadn’t recalled until Remus reminded him. It had been rather bulldozed over by the rest. But he supposed the scars and things couldn’t’ve been from much else. “I remember,” he said. 

“Do you.” 

[ It detached — shredding apart — its definition faded, like old film atomizing — ] 

“Remus — ”

“What?” 

“Don’t start.” 

The radio played a stuttering trumpet solo. Remus pulled his shirt over his crotch. He was looking around feverishly at the machinery as though he might be able to do something to turn the tide of it. 

“What are you going to do,” Sirius said. 

Remus sighed and stood. Sirius fought the urge to pull him closer by the inside of his thigh. “You should radio the old man and tell him — our suspicion. I’m going to try to run more power to the transmitter.” 

“You’ll black out this whole valley.” 

“They’ll explain that away one way or another.” 

He was halfway up the stairs when Sirius called after him — “Remus?” 

“What?” 

“It’s not your fault.” 

He had paused on the creaking stairs, shifting his bare feet. Lovely, Sirius thought, wildly, startled by it. “Who said it was?” 

\--

[ Sirius and James had gone to the old man’s office at Hogwarts on a Tuesday in the late morning to tell him. Dumbledore, expecting them, had arranged a tray of fresh pastries from the kitchens. A house-elf produced tea and coffee from an antechamber. Later that afternoon, the old man told them, he would be meeting with a pureblood collective from Leicester to see if any concessions might induce them to stand against the Dark Lord. James bristled to hear this but it was of no matter. They had not come to discuss politics and indeed by that time (February 1981, eight months out from the infinite) Dumbledore did not pay much credence to their opinions on such matters. That was, he reminded them, at times harshly, robustly not why they were in his service. 

Sirius gave the old man in painful fits and starts the speech he had rehearsed the evening previous in the guest bedroom at James and Lily’s place, which was that collectively they had gathered the facts and decided based on them that the most likely spy was Remus. When it was over he thought he might throw up, but he was pinned in place in the chintz armchair by the weight of the old man’s sharp cobalt stare, interrogative, damning. When it moved on to James Sirius’s heart jolted and stuttered against his ribs. “Ah,” said the old man at last. Something about his face seemed to have collapsed just so, like a single ancient buttress supporting a decaying cathedral. “But is he not in Dubrovnik?” 

They had not known Remus was in Dubrovnik. Chief among the suspicions raised in a meeting at the Potter house was that Remus would never tell them where he was going. “He is,” said James. “But he knew Fenwick was at the safe house in Nether Poppleton.” 

“So did all the Order.” 

“Don’t you worry they might’ve gotten to him,” Sirius said, too loudly, acid in his throat, “all this work, all these things you have him do.” 

At the time he was still partly willing to believe that Remus had been seduced somehow. After all that was what all the werewolf lords and vampire covenmasters were traveling over Europe doing each and every day to those among their kind who had attempted one breed of assimilation or another. “I don’t worry,” Dumbledore said, “about that, at all.” 

“So you don't think — ” 

“I will speak to him when he returns.” 

The voice was the sternest Sirius had ever heard it. Sterner even than a previous occasion on which he and James and Dumbledore had discussed a betrayal having to do with Remus in this very office. 

“In the meantime.” Dumbledore’s eyes fixed Sirius again. “James, Sirius is your secret keeper?” 

“He is.” 

There was some message he could not read in the bright blue gaze and yet he refused to break it. He would still be James’s secret keeper for some time yet. It was not until September of that year, when he returned to London from Dover half-mad with sleeplessness, so high on his and Remus’s fight in the hotel he swore he might breathe fire if he tried to speak, that he told James he was at last certain, and that as such he should consider another. ] 

\--

He climbed the drainpipe to the roof painfully. The sharp noonday sun on the whitewashed brick and pale wood refracted into his hungover skull at just the right shattering angle. Remus was up there, now with pants on, having shifted the filthy canvas he and Sirius had months ago laid over all the necessary electrical wires to prevent being spotted from the air; he looked like the doomed protagonist of a science fiction film faced with impending nuclear meltdown and a command console with its instructions rendered in Mandarin Chinese. His face was pale with the sickly remnant of the wine. He looked up at Sirius with an expression of defeated desperation and then he looked down at the wires again. 

“The old man is coming from Paris,” said Sirius. 

Remus passed a hand weakly over his face. “Right,” he said. 

“There isn’t much we can do, he said,” Sirius went on. “It’s — even with more power, he said he didn’t know if we could eclipse it…” 

“How powerful is the signal?” 

“They don’t know. They’re trying to triangulate it now.” 

“It’ll be close,” Remus said. “It’ll be in the valley. And it’ll be gone before they — ” 

He covered his mouth with his hand, as though he could not go on. 

“He didn’t sound — suspicious of us, in case you’re — ” 

“Think about it for one goddamn second, Black,” Remus said. He dragged the canvas over the wires again. “It’ll take the old man two or three hours to get here. We need to change the transmission again in — ” he checked his watch — “one hour. And when we do I don’t doubt they’ll end the interfering broadcast. Are you following?” 

“I — yes.” 

“They’ll triangulate the source of the signal into the valley. By that time probably the broadcast will have ended. And the only people who will have heard it are us — ”

“ — and the old man,” said Sirius, but his stomach was twisting. 

“You already know how the old man behaves.” 

“Do I?” 

“His railing on and on about the greater good… do you remember?” 

[ After some funeral or another (they ran together a little at the end) they were all in the Hog’s Head. Remus was sitting in a corner speaking intently with that person without a face and occasionally glaring daggers at Sirius in seeming memory of the fight they’d had a week previous, which had not yet entirely been settled and which indeed would never be settled. Even then Sirius found he couldn’t exactly recall the particulars of the matter. He was drinking over this and the rest of it with suicidal energy and eventually he went out into the alleyway to piss intending to slam his head against the wall a few times while he was at it. But the old man was out there smoking one of his Macedonian herbal cigarettes. “Lovely evening,” he said. He was looking up, but there were no stars. 

“Yeah,” said Sirius, swaying a little on his feet. He was looking for a way out but the drunkenness and its antecedents seemed to have compounded everything into a kind of labyrinth. He desperately wanted a cigarette but Dumbledore’s herbal ones made him nauseous even to smell. “I just wanted — well I’ll head back — ”

“Wait.” 

He stopped in the doorway. An ambulance went by outside on the street. 

“I recognize — I’ve been meaning to tell you. I see the sacrifices you have made. The sacrifices you all have made.” 

Maybe this was a dream. He rested his head against the metal doorframe which was cool. 

“It has been a great challenge to me to, you know, to pontificate on what exactly it is we are fighting for, in the face of so much death,” said the old man. “So much death and suffering.” 

He was drunk, Sirius realized; his speech slurred a little on _and suffering._

“And you are all so very young. I hope you don’t think it doesn’t trouble me.” 

Sirius had nothing good to say to this, and none of the bad could be appropriately articulated while so drunk. So he said nothing at all. He thought about going inside without acknowledging the conversation whatsoever and indeed he would later recognize that that was what he should’ve done. Dumbledore dropped the ember of his herbal cigarette and twisted it out under the pointy toe of his boot against the wet sidewalk. “It troubles me,” he said again. 

“I understand,” Sirius told him, though he didn’t. He laid awake thinking about it more often than not. 

“I am only concerned,” said the old man, “with the greater — ” 

He hiccuped, which startled Sirius in its ridiculousness. They went inside again. He never told anybody about this conversation and didn’t think about it much until — ] 

“He won’t hesitate,” Remus said mildly. He shielded his eyes from the sun and looked downvalley as if watching for the old man’s black car. “Think of what he did before.” 

“What did he — ”

“I know you remember.” 

[ In the silver belly of the boat his ankles were bound and his wrists behind his back with a burning cord of magic. The old man was deep in consultation with the officers who piloted the vessel. He could not remember what he had said in his own defense. The drug they had given to him was wearing off. He understood that the focus in which his mind had rendered the world was sharpening for the last time in his life. After this it would be over. His consciousness would be a technicality. He recalled he had asked the judge to consider execution. Dumbledore had served as both his defender and prosecutor. There was, everyone had said, simply no time for formalities. ] 

The light was splitting through the pale sky breaking the world open in the fragile seams of it. He clung to it even as the sunshine dulled like a well-used knife. They would be sent, he imagined, to London; they would be tried hastily; spies might’ve died and as such execution would be considered, they would be publicly identified as communist sympathizers; it would be splayed in bold type across the front page of every tabloid newspaper that they had failed psychological examinations and perhaps their nascent physical relationship would even be acknowledged in vague terms such as “moral crimes” or “sexual deviancy”; they would be separated, interrogated extensively via “special methodology,” imprisoned in some so-called black site whose existence would not be officially acknowledged for decades. [The prison — back as ever to the prison — ] At the Salem Witch Trials men and women had confessed under torture to practicing dark magic. Who knew what might happen after that. Hanging? 

[ He himself had confessed, he remembered. After all he had killed James and Lily by reason of his own obsessive and possessing certainty that he had been intimately betrayed in a way entirely more obvious than — ] 

The world cracked and broke like an eggshell. Impossibly now he could hear the sea. Remus was with him without physical form as a kind of refraction of that dull gray light. “Do you remember,” he said. 

He was more certain now than he had been before. It was nearly real. “Almost,” he said. 

\--

[ Outside the window in the brooding dusk the lights of a Muggle fishing vessel were visible as burning stars on the horizon. And he recalled he was alone. He watched the ship until it was out of sight. Somewhere inside the great cavernous echoing fortress someone’s desperate prayer litany which he had been listening to abstractly for days, or perhaps months, or perhaps years, or perhaps only twenty minutes, had dissolved into abstract atonal screams and moans. 

He was obliged to transfigure more of his own blood into ink. He cut his hair and beard again with the sharpened edge of the spoon and threw the tangled, matted refuse out onto the rocks for the gulls. He lay in the floor as the dog trying to whet the chipping edges of his mind against those few wheels that still worked. When the creatures were far enough from the door he put his human skin on and tattooed himself again, across his thigh between his knee and the very old twisted blue-healed rendering of the prison. _BETRAYED._

He studied his tattoos for a sign. _MY GODSON. PSALM 137._ The sigil of the prison-castle and beside it the compass rose delineating the direction — westerly — he would have to swim to reach land. The moon chart, the dog’s head, the stag’s rack of antlers. The round cup, illustrated crookedly, of a peace lily. 

He was missing the fifth player on the stage of fate. The who, and the why. And the what now. So he dreamed again. ]


	6. Chapter 6

At dusk they woke and gathered the precious water that had collected in the stills in the long brutal day. Remus wet a corner of cloth in some of it and cleaned the wound in his leg. The swelling had gone down and he was no longer so feverish but the nearly unbearable measure of pain had yet to unfurrow from his brow. Sometime while Sirius had slept Remus had made some improvements to the crutch he’d fashioned out of an old fence stake with thin plastic and fabric found on the desert. At first Remus had tried to lift his leg off the ground but now he just dragged it behind him in the broken road such that the toe of his sneaker had torn through. If ever again they found friendly civilization (which of course was desperately unlikely) the bone would have to be rebroken so it could heal straight. Sometimes Sirius remembered the look of it on the first night but more often he remembered nothing at all. 

When it was full dark they gathered their camp and moved on again. They no longer saw the thin smudge of firelight on the desert smudged and wavered by heat and distance. No one lived out here in the borderlands, owing to the landscape’s inhospitable nature and the patrols upon the roads. They navigated by the stars and the blue shadow of the moonlight in the widening bowl of sand and rock and when there was no moon they walked onward anyway in the darkness. 

\--

“Where are we going?” 

In their camp in the shattered shifting shade of a Joshua tree Remus was roasting cactus on a charcoal fire. The heat of the day was so thick it was almost textured but they could not risk a fire at night. The smoke alone was dangerous but they required to eat because most nights they would walk ten miles or so. Remus flipped one of the pieces of cactus on the coals with the end of his crutch. “To the border,” he said.  
“Will they let us through?” 

“I don’t know. We’ll see.” 

“And you know how to get there?” 

Remus but his lip, an occurrence so frequent these days there was a little red wound there. At first Sirius didn’t think he would say anything at all. Indeed, he didn’t until he had flipped the pieces of cactus out of the fire onto a flat stone and with his crutch smudged the charcoal out into a black scar in the thin, colorless sand. “I came from there,” he said finally. “I’m from Tuscon.” 

“Right,” Sirius lied. “I remember now.” 

It wasn’t the worst thing he’d forgotten. “Do you,” Remus said absently, clearly not expecting an answer. The cactus was tough still and almost too hot to eat but they were hungry enough to try. “We used to make it at home,” Remus said, “if you recall. In corn tortillas with salsa and things.” 

“I do remember that.” 

“Good. That’s good.” 

“We had — like a little garden.” 

“Yes, we did. That’s good.” 

He couldn’t remember anything else. After a while he buried the ash and charcoal in the warm sand and Remus checked the stitches on his forehead. He let Remus sleep and watched the horizon. At golden hour he woke Remus up to take over the watch, and slept. He dreamed, as he usually did, that it was raining. 

\--

He walked out back and looked over the desert which plunged away from the hill. In Pioneertown, as in much else of the former San Bernardino County and indeed much of the former Southern California, it was manifestly evident that geologic history slept with you in your bed at night. They could see the long fault in the valley from up on the mountain early in the morning before the haze as a kind of slipping yonic rift in the earth, hued a stark grey-brown in the desert’s palette of beiges. Stray dogs ran in the yard, seeking scraps. Outside Lily was in the garden with the baby who was covered in dirt. Remus was in the bar and downstairs in the basement James was meticulously weighing out the quantity of homegrown marijuana that in three days’ time they would be obliged to trade down in Yucca Valley. On the porch a person without a face or perhaps with a thousand faces changing all the time was smoking a cigarette and when he greeted Sirius his voice sounded like the static between the militia, military, and cultist radio broadcasts. This person without a face had never had a face, but no one else seemed to notice. 

They lived well after the initial terror. It was a matter of luck and determination alone. They each of them possessed a dogged will to survive which had walked with them and looked through their eyes when it was worst. 

When Sirius left Seattle, fire had been raining from the sky for five days and nights. He had been hiding along with most of the survivors of the initial siege and subsequent tectonic upheavals in the light rail tunnels between the airport and the university district. It was from here that they set out once the storm had marginally quelled. There was not much left of the city but a possessed, primordial ridge of mud in which humans and their edifices were alike rotting. On the silty horizon the living mountain had changed its shape and the wreckage of it steamed. The surface of the sound was black with ash and pockets of the water were still aflame where oil had spilled from sunken ships and underwater pipelines. 

His party of refugees did not dare travel south because of the mountain and they did not dare travel north because the border had been so heavily militarized since the beginning of it all and they did not dare travel east because the Cascades were burning and they knew the flatlands beyond the mountains were patrolled by militias. And yet there was no more west. And even if there had been, there was no way to get across the sound. And so they traveled east. The band was comprised of university students and yuppies and punks and marijuana growers and old hippies and programming engineers who had retired at forty. They were killed indiscriminately by the snows, by the fires and the raining ash, by disease, by infection in their various wounds, by unseen enemies. They kept off the roads and moved in the night and kept the mountains always in view to the right shoulder lest they come too near to the Hanford nuclear site on the Columbia River between Yakima and Kennewick. In the night they could never be sure which fires were wild and which belonged to enemies. Ash fell like snow. In April of that year four of the remaining thirty of their number drowned swimming across the Columbia into Oregon just east of The Dalles. Many of the rest were killed in Bend in a barfight two months later and in Klamath Falls at the end of the year there was a mutiny which disbanded the tribe of refugees for good. Sirius walked alone into California and alone to the coast and alone along the spine of the continent to the root of it. 

At first he found it morally difficult to do things like kill animals and break shop windows to loot necessaries. After all he had been raised on Mercer Island and had summered in the San Juans; he had gone to prep school, he had been a sophomore at the University of Washington with a paid internship at a tech startup when the world fell. In short he wasn’t like Remus who had already had one foot in the wild world when it became the only one. After not so very long wandering alone through California he realized everyone still living had gotten there by doing whatever it took to survive, and he would not be able to compete with them if he didn’t. And as soon as he killed a person for the first time he did not find it difficult to kill animals anymore. 

When he arrived in Los Angeles two years after his departure from Seattle he was a changed man and exhausted beyond description. He spent a few months working for a contingent who grew assorted psychoactive flora in the basement of an old mansion off Mulholland Drive. These goods were traded biweekly at open market in Glendale, and it was at this market that Sirius’s employer was executed by a rival grower aligned with the then-nascent collective of Death Eaters. Sirius left from there directly and walked alone inland. Wildfires burning in the forest flanked the city like a sieging army and the air was so thick with smoke that through it the sun appeared as a red bead. 

He walked east into the desert and it was as such he came to Pioneertown. James and Lily were already there. The faceless man joined them in the winter, to Sirius’s chagrin, though no one else seemed to notice his facelessness. And after not so very long Sirius found him easy to ignore. Last to join them on the mountain was Remus who Lily found unconscious on the edge of the property starved and barefoot whilst she was hunting for rabbits. He’d been stabbed in the gut and had cauterized this wound himself by burning it with a red-hot knife. He had walked, he told them when he woke up, from Arizona. This confirmed, to their shock, that there was still an Arizona. 

\--

In the still of the night they walked on in silence watching and listening for convoys on the desert. For years it had been dangerous to travel because the roads were largely patrolled by Death Eaters. They were obliged to move on the back roads, which were discernible only by the guardrails on account of the sand having blown over. Sometimes they heard coyotes and the shouts and signals of smuggling rings — sigils spraypainted against a spread of clear asphalt, crude wind chimes ringing scrap metal in evil low tones on the night breeze. Remus cut edible cactus with his knife and stripped the spines off and stowed each piece in the pockets of his overalls. He whet this knife daily whilst they camped on whatever stone he could find and then before they left camp he rubbed the lacerations off the surface of the rock with sand so as to leave no trace of their presence there. Once or twice they were obliged to duck behind the dunes or into the tangled brush on the side of the road at the sound of tires and squealing brakes and roaring engines miles away across the endless still desert. 

“What do you remember about Tuscon,” Sirius asked as they set up camp in the morning in a copse of Joshua trees. 

“It was hot,” said Remus. “We used to go out into the desert and take shrooms. Um, Mexican food. Being at a protest in Phoenix getting shot at by cops with rubber bullets.” 

“You grew up there.” 

“Yes. Dropped out of ninth grade and everything.” 

“Then what happened?” 

Remus said nothing, as though the answer were obvious. As though he perhaps had said everything he would ever say on the subject at some removed juncture released now from Sirius’s mind as jetsam from a sinking ship. 

They ate, dug the stills for water, slept. At sunset Remus woke him and checked the wound on his forehead. “It’s almost closed,” he said. Gently he pressed the big green-black bruise around it with the warm callused pads of his fingers. “Does it hurt anymore?” 

It was a cold, dull sort of pain which bit into his mind via his bruised skull. This new variety of hurt (at first it had been different) reminded him of swimming in the sound on a dare one spring evening; the water had been so cold it numbed inside his head. He supposed that was sort of what had happened this time except the numbness had stuck around and wasn’t going away. “It doesn’t hurt,” he told Remus. “Not badly anyway.” 

“So a little.” 

“Just a little.” 

“And did you remember anything new?” 

“About the garden,” Sirius said lamely. “The cactus tacos.” 

“I mean from — you know. From Yucca Valley.” 

“From where?” 

Remus looked away. He was biting both his lips inside his mouth to keep from saying any more. 

They moved on. They slept again in the moving shadow beneath a long ridge. He woke from silent suffocating nightmares at dusk and watched in mute, frozen horror as Remus inspected the horrible wound in his leg, having unwrapped it from its canvas bandages to clean and breathe it. He had seen wounds like that, he recalled, on corpses. And in the earth, from the crest of the mountain on a clear day, when the shearing red fault was visible like an old lipstick mark in the pale valley. 

He recalled that in the nightmare he had lifted Remus up under his arms and Remus’s head had lolled back upon his shoulder. There was blood in his mouth from having bitten through his tongue running over his cheeks and chin like spilt ink or the juice of a ripe rich fruit. Sirius’s forehead was bleeding a black shadow into his eye and through the good one he watched consciousness slip in and out of Remus’s face like a spring breeze. The terrible smell all around was burning flesh and hair. Behind the bar the bottles of mezcal and bathtub whiskey were exploding one by one with heat; the burst of alcohol upon the flames acted as a gleeful accelerant. Outside they were laughing and circling in dust in their demonic vehicles. He recalled the legends they had heard from shiftless, damaged travelers about Death Eater rivals being run to death or hunted in the desert like animals.  
“Ready to go,” Remus asked, in the elusive now. Carefully wrapping the filthy canvas around the memory and the wreckage of it again. 

\--

In the old days they were drinking mezcal on the porch just before dawn, watching as their neighbors stripped for parts a newish army-issue vehicle belonging to a visitor from Palm Springs, who was passed out inside at the bar. 

“We used to do this all the time,” Remus said, watching their neighbors wrench open the engine with a crowbar. It must have been early in it, Sirius realized, if they still had living neighbors closer than Rimrock. “Really the most useful bit is the battery,” Remus went on. 

It was a rare opportunity which could not be missed. Like catching a firefly inside a jar. “Who’s we?” he asked. 

[ It changed, but it stayed the same. James and Lily were inside entertaining some people including the typical unrememberable face. Remus had come back two days previous from Estonia in a state of shocked, exhausted silence. He had fallen asleep in the bath they had taken together in the claw-foot tub at Sirius’s place above the butcher’s shop. They were supposed to have dinner together all of them to talk about it but Remus had gotten up even before dessert to say he would do dishes, which he did the Muggle way mostly because it would take longer. And anyway when Sirius went to join him he wasn’t doing dishes at all but rather he was picking the blood out from beneath his fingernails with a steak knife. Sirius looked into the dining room where they were all laughing discussing something or other Dearborn had done and when he had ascertained they were all distracted he dared to touch the small of Remus’s back where his waist in his jeans, accentuated by his belt, was even narrower than Sirius recalled. It was the most intimately he had ever dared to touch Remus in anything resembling public, and Remus dropped the knife into the sink where it clattered on the dishes. Sirius let him go as though he were a hot stove. “Okay in there?” James called through the door. 

They went out together onto the porch. “He knows,” Remus said. 

“What?” 

“James.” 

“How does he — ”

“I didn’t tell him. Can’t you just tell he knows?” 

They had a cigarette together listening to the last insects. “Let’s go home,” Sirius said. 

“We can’t just leave.” 

“Can’t we?” 

“No, unfortunately.” Remus rested his forehead in the palm of his hand. “The old man’s coming.” 

“Really?” 

“I thought you knew.” 

“Well I didn’t.” 

Perhaps it was fraying so quickly because he kept trying to stop it fraying so aggressively the seams were coming apart under the weight of the thick patches. 

“He lives in this bunch of caves,” Remus said out of nowhere. Very quickly and too loudly — as though it were dragged out of him with magnets. Later Sirius would interrogate this moment and find it suspicious. “In the mountains,” Remus went on. “Twenty or thirty of them. And more on the full moons or so he said.” 

“He said?” 

“It was arranged — our meeting. In a fucking dingy Muggle pub.” He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. Sirius didn’t dare touch him, because of the ever-present all-seeing eyes inside. “Basically he said, this is where we are if you ever change your mind.” 

And will you, Sirius did not ask. 

“He’s like a wild west villain,” said Remus. He was watching off over Sirius’s shoulder into the night, as though for a visitor. “Like this big outlaw wild man. It turns your stomach — it’s terrifying even to look at him. But — ”

He froze, as though he had touched upon a wound. “But what,” Sirius asked him. ] 

“It was easier,” said Remus on the porch at the bar, “it was a lot easier then, to let go of it all.” 

“To let go of what?” 

“I don’t know. Everything but one’s will to live I suppose. It’s — maybe you know, perhaps you felt this, before. You can recall in your lizard brain that humans are pack animals.” 

“Are we?” 

“Yes. We’ve built this motley pack of lost ones now haven’t we? In difficult times it’s not hard to give your soul to the collective to survive. Would you agree?” 

This shocked him. In the walking southerly from Seattle he had not found it easy to forfeit any of his own personal ambition to live for the good of others he didn’t know. Probably this was compounded by the fact that none of them who lived long enough to cross Snoqualmie Pass had been willing to do so either. “I don’t know,” Sirius said at last. 

“Perhaps it was different for you then.” 

“I think it was.” 

The valley was glowing with the light coming slowly over the eastern ridge. The neighbors rolled and carried and dragged on makeshift sledges the pieces of the truck off into the living night. 

“We shared everything we found,” Remus said. 

“Then how come you got stabbed?” 

Remus didn’t say anything but his brow furrowed tightly and he looked away. Eventually he got up and went inside. Whilst the sun came up slowly as though pulled into the world by a string Sirius walked up into the mountains to look down over the fault before the haze beset the view. 

\--

He dreamed they were driving down into the valley all five crowded in the old Cadillac. In his dreams the faceless man had a face but something about it was incomprehensible or indescribable despite its normalness and he forgot its features upon waking. There was a bushel of pot in the trunk which reeked. They laughed together at a stupid joke of James’s then the itchy silence reigned again. 

[ They wandered on the dusk moor and in the woods, wands drawn, attuned to the precious silence. They were looking for a resonant location in the woods where an informant had left items of import. It was July 1978. “You’re not afraid,” said James to the faceless man, “are you?” 

Sirius laughed despite himself. Remus gave him a sharp, cold look; he often did in moments like this, but he never did anything worse. The faceless man’s response was garbled to Sirius’s ear but it seemed to satisfy James. They moved on. 

The woods was as a labyrinth. ] As they drove downhill into Yucca Valley the hazy blur of buildings on the horizon never seemed to get much closer. Beside him Sirius watched the strange un-face shift. They were sitting so close together in the backseat of the Cadillac that he could hear the spine-chilling mouth-breathing rattle and smell the particular sharpness of nervous sweat. 

[ “It’s the only way,” said James. They were in the far back corner on a Friday night at the Hog’s Head. It was so loud and crowded in there they’d found it was the most secure place to discuss important matters. “It’s the only way, right?” 

“Right,” said Sirius. 

James reached across the table and clasped Sirius’s wrist. “And you're certain,” he said. 

“As certain as I’ve ever been about anything.” James’s grasp tightened, thumb pressing painfully into Sirius’s pulse. His mouth was tight and his forehead lined with worry; sometimes, in the wrong light, he looked like a much older man. “I’m certain,” Sirius told him, meeting his eyes, “I am.” 

James let go and leaned back in the booth, crossing his arms over his chest. He hadn’t bothered to shave for perhaps a week and it seemed that also in that time he had not bothered to sleep. He looked around the room scanning faces in the practiced manner of someone who had been hunted for many years. “He’s at the bar,” he said at last, a little painedly. 

Sirius pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. The darkness expanded. 

“This is your last chance to take it back if you don’t mean it, Padfoot.” ] 

He woke with a start. It was dusk and Remus was gathering the water from the stills. The last blush of sun upon the desert drew his face into artful, pained shadows. Without speaking they packed up the camp, and when it was full dark they set off again to the east by the stars. Eventually Remus turned to him. “How did we get here,” he said. 

“Illegitimate election,” Sirius answered confidently. “The news came out and the party in power resigned — then there was a coup. They installed a government that was only recognized by a couple states. So it all splintered. Then the war. Then all the… well, you know.” 

With his knife Remus was cutting the thorns off a piece of cactus so he could put it in his pocket. “I meant,” he said, not quite looking in Sirius’s direction, “how did you and I, how did _we_ get _here_ , not generally.” 

“I hardly remember,” Sirius told him. “I was drunk. I hate to admit it. But so were you.” 

[ Remus went to the bar to get double gins. His eyes were purest black with shock and his back in his shirt painfully rigid. Old fear giving way to vigilance. When he came back Sirius found the distance between them across the table simply unbearably excruciating. He thought of the various and sundry sex dreams he had had about Remus at one time and had simply chalked up to an abundance of weed, hormones, and the ritualistic male bonding experience of running around together in the woods as animals. He wondered in a way he would not have had the war not opened some floodgate in the back of his mind if perhaps he should have taken these for a sign. 

They went back to the flat above the butcher shop and Sirius rolled a joint while Remus put a record on: Television’s _Marquee Moon_. What I want, I want now — and it’s so much more than anyhow — It was dawn. They danced. He felt unforgivably alive. Fuck them all, he thought, if they don’t want this magic I’ll take it all. 

They stepped through the light which shifted upon the floor. Downstairs the smell of blood had started to waft up through the floorboards. They started the record over from the beginning. 

I’ll eat it all, he thought. All to myself. I want every last bit of it. He thought probably humans had felt this way about rhythm and lust and magic at the beginning of consciousness and probably they would at the end of it… ] 

“We were out back looking at stars. Is that — ”

“ — not what I mean.” 

“What?” 

Remus looked off across the desert shading his eyes against the moonlight with the hand not controlling the movement of the crutch. “That’s not what I mean either. But yes. That’s — we were out back looking at stars.” 

“You don’t like thinking about it, do you.” 

He didn’t think Remus would answer. It was rare that they spoke about this. Sirius listened to the sound of his crutch and his dragging foot in the slipping sand and his tight breath with the catch of pain just in it. At last Remus said, “No.” 

“Why not?” 

“Maybe you’d know if you remembered.” 

He meant this as a blow and it succeeded. At least he looked like he regretted saying it, though he didn’t apologize. 

At dawn they encamped in an abandoned trailer collapsing into the desert and graffitied with messaging in the eerie tone of the eschaton cults who wandered here and there across the wastes: _no one dared to look into another’s face, or speak in the horror of the illimitable scream of a whole world about us…_ There was a rainwater cassette out back sweating and fragrant with water but they had heard tell of Death Eaters poisoning such supplies so they dug their own stills in the sun again, tucking mesquite cuttings into the holes to generate condensation. 

They took turns sleeping for a few hours at a time and Remus cooked the cactus over coals out back. After they ate he checked the stitches in Sirius’s forehead and ascertained the wound had healed enough to remove them. “It was fucking stupid,” he said, “wasn’t it.” So help him at first Sirius did not know what he was talking about. Remus’s hands were warm, he smelled like dust, his sweat, which was like wet earth, and the salt and tannin of blood. “To even think — it was fucking stupid of us.” 

“To think what?”

“That it could happen. In this world.” 

[ Wishful, he had thought of it, recalling, in bed sometimes, he woke up in the morning and the light through the curtains was unbearably soft, and he could choose to remember for some collapsing expanse of time, shrinking on each occasion, extended by certain drugs, squandered by others, that this was how it was, and that this was allowed. They lay in bed together late and then they made breakfast. They went to the laundromat or to the library and got takeaway curry and ate with their fingers in bed and tried impossibly to get the ancient heater to work. Their friends knew and didn’t care and neither did their coworkers at whatever pathetic normal jobs they’d managed to secure in this version of reality. Wishful thinking. Chiefly it glossed over perhaps the most serious problem of them all, even beyond the war, which was that their combined personalities under pressure were volatile enough to split an atom. ] 

He could feel, he thought, every strand of fiber in the bloody black thread which Remus pulled loose from his skin. The cold careful metal of Remus’s knife breaking through the strands. “We made good food,” he said for some reason, “in spite of it.” 

“That’s different.” 

“Is it.” 

It wasn’t, he thought he should say, much different for me; it was another symptom of the same, which was that he had found a place after two hellish horrible years where he had thought he might attempt to remake his life, and he had unlearned the important things, like the precise measure of selflessness that could be afforded when one’s society had collapsed. For those years on the road he had eaten beans out of cans and squirrels and rabbits with the fur still on and drank water out of muddy puddles and lakes, and he’d thought about sex like television, a vestige of the past which was gone, and love like peace, an assumed vestige of the past which had never truly existed at all. 

“You carried me out of there,” Remus said. “Do you remember that?” 

“Almost.” 

“It was burning… It’s like a dream to me now. You carried me for a long time.” Sirius could hear him swallow. At last he said, not really a question, “Why?” 

He recalled in the Dalles years previous watching from the bank as one of the members of his refugee contingent was sucked underneath the roiling grey-black Columbia, turgid with snowmelt, as though pulled beneath the waters by an unseen hand. The survivors were obliged to leave the beach post-haste because there were militias on the bridges which were almost in sight around the bends of the river. It was not until they found tree cover again at night that they realized four were drowned. 

“I don’t remember,” Sirius lied. 

\--

He did remember: toward the beginning of it some satellites had fallen to earth. He had seen one of them in Seattle, crashing into the sound with all the other flaming junk on the nth day of natural and unnatural siege. On this particular occasion he and Remus were out back of the bar watching at the sky trying to decide whether a certain bright painterly streak moving in the firmament was one of the surviving satellites or a shooting star on which they might wish for something unthinkable. Remus laughed a helpless shaking laugh. (They had also been smoking pot.) Sirius put his nose behind Remus’s ear thinking he might tell him a secret. There was a fresh, sharp smell to his hair, like mesquite smoke. He stilled but didn’t move, like a deer. Sirius kissed his ear and then touched his belly where his t-shirt had ridden up. 

He didn’t remember what the secret had been. Perhaps there had never been a secret at all, or otherwise he had expressed it later, physically; it was rather an open secret, a kind of secret that almost everyone keeps at one time or another, even after the end of the world. But still it needed keeping. It might still be kept. 

They went inside and closed the curtains and lit the precious candle beside the bed. [ Remus put a record on — it was _Lust for Life_ by Iggy Pop. Have you got condoms, Sirius asked him, and Remus said no, don’t you know the spell? Jealousy tasted like every single song ever written about jealousy back to drum circles and Gregorian chanting. This was sufficiently enough to banish from his consciousness every remaining voice which said that perhaps this was a bad idea, and even the more diplomatic and judicious voices reminding him perhaps you should stick to hand jobs the first few times you have sex with your second-best friend. It was the influence, he later reasoned, of near-death and Iggy Pop. As though he had not for years been vexed to nightmare by the sound of “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” ]

It went onward predictably as written in every story. He regretted once in a while that it had been so rough but he had felt at the time that he had never needed anything so badly in his life. When he came the force of this final, desperate thrust shoved Remus up the bed and he made a wounded noise which tasted like a sour ambrosia to Sirius then in the throes of a decadent and irresponsible ecstasy. It seemed to him for an elastic moment that he had survived it all for a precise feeling, which was this feeling, for which he could continue to survive until the end of time. 

They slept. When he woke he kissed Remus’s back and traced his ribs until he felt the pace of Remus’s breath deepen. His skin was dewy with sweat and warm and the light came in grey through the heavy curtains and over the shallow comma of his body in the bed. At last Sirius seized whatever bravery or commitment necessary to chase two fingers along the emergent bones of Remus’s spine — freckles, scars, wingspan of hips — and press the pads of them against-inside him. Some unfamiliar emotion or something else startling wrung his chest like a wet cloth. He could hear the wet, separating sound of Remus’s jaw coming open. 

[ “Alright?” 

The voice broke a little and he could feel, intimately, the pitch and timbre of it, as though he were tuning a piano: “Yes.” 

He dug deeper. He was searching for something, he realized, almost sober; the light of day was cold. Remus pressed back against him. 

“I hoped you would,” Remus said. It sounded forced out. “I dreamed — ”

He would not say what it had been. Sirius reached over Remus’s hip to stroke his half-erection but Remus batted his hand away. “Don’t you want — ”

“No — I just — let me — ”

Sirius did. Occasionally he curled his fingers or shifted them apart a little, testing, feeling the way Remus tensed and thrilled. How incrementally his hips began to shift in time in a stuttering facsimile of fucking. It felt in a way it had manifestly not earlier like slowly removing the cork from a vial which contained every good feeling of which humans were capable. Sirius watched his own cock smear wet patterns at the join of Remus’s ass and thigh where there was a bright bite mark bruising. Eventually he realized something horrible. “I didn’t hurt you earlier, did I?” 

“Yes,” Remus said casually, “you did.” 

“I’m — ”

“Don’t be sorry.” 

It gave him the wrong idea even then that like this he could feel the core of Remus’s voice. And he could tell, or so he thought, when Remus was lying. He lay on his back in the bed and let Remus take him inside. The atavistic familiarity of the slender scarred hands braced against his stomach and his heaving chest was an intense, visceral shock. He was not accustomed to the look of pleasure upon the intense and tormented face and it blindsided him. For a precious moment he thought he might cry. 

Remus found something inside himself that shook him open and rocked to shift Sirius’s cock against it. Sirius reached to the wet burning place they were joined and found Remus’s fingers there too, seeking proof tangible of this new and profound reality which he could not see. Remus came the moment Sirius pressed a finger past the stretched ring of muscle to join his cock inside, and his body wrung something out from Sirius like liquid from a cloth. A sharp, fierce white light. They lay together then in the half-darkness. He tried to pull out but Remus wouldn’t let him. 

Perhaps that was the only reason why they kept doing it. It struck Sirius toward the end that he had never considered Remus’s motivation for their continued affair, and felt it reasonable to ascribe this as everything else that mystified him to the perceived obvious. They spent the weekend fucking, in the bed, against the wall, on the kitchen floor, in the bathtub (warm water, cold water, empty) and occasionally he found he could grasp the certainty he would never die. On Monday morning they stumbled forth into reality as though just born, bleary-eyed, knock-kneed, stunned by the shape of the world, its sharp edges, its grayness. It did not take either of them very long to realize the crux of what they had just done, which was invent another wedge for the war to drive between them now. ] 

\--

“How did we get here,” Remus asked again when they were underway walking easterly that night. 

“I left Seattle three weeks after the geologic event,” Sirius told him. “Then it took me two years to walk to L.A., four months there, and another two months to come out here. And you left Tuscon — you never told me why.” 

“There was a mutiny against my father,” Remus said. 

“I thought you left your family when you were a kid.” 

“Well, not my father by blood. And anyway that’s not what I mean.” 

“What do you — not your father by blood?” 

“I meant, how did you and I get — why are we here, walking in the desert like this.” 

Neither of them answered. Far off Sirius could hear the low tone of smugglers’ bells and a coyote yapping somewhere far and away beyond the stone and the hills. Remus’s bad foot dragging in the sand like a snake. After perhaps a half hour Remus said, “He was just the leader, you know, of our… He said, think of me as your father. I never knew mine so it wasn’t that hard. Anyway, then the mutiny.” 

“And which side were you on?” 

Remus seemed to consider this for a moment. “It was my idea,” he said at last, as though the notion still surprised him. 

“What?” 

“He was an evil man.” 

“But you said you shared everything — ” 

“It’s your turn,” Remus said sharply. “How did we get here?” 

“We walked from Pioneertown. I forget the road.” 

“California Route 62. Why?” 

“Because the Death Eaters are following us.” 

“Why?” 

“I don’t — ”

Remus sighed like a schoolteacher with a troublesome pupil. “What do the Death Eaters do.” 

“Patrol the roads. Smuggle drugs. Reave and pillage and all of it.” 

“Not only drugs,” Remus reminded him. “All goods for trade.” 

“But drugs was the problem.” 

“Yes. Good. Drugs was the problem.” 

“We were selling — ”

“Yes. Do you remember in the basement — ”

“I remember you were in charge of the shrooms,” Sirius said. “You had the spores when we found you.” 

He had had them stowed carefully in a paper bag sewn inside the cuff of his canvas pants. It was a near thing, because the pants were so filthy and bloodstained they nearly burned them. He said he had taken them with him as a sort of currency. In those days it was a trend among the eschaton cults to incorporate psychedelic immersion into their ceremonies and rituals, but drugs of that nature had mostly lost favor with traders after everything that had happened. They let Remus stay to bring the crop up and then when he did it sold so well they let him stay on. James and Lily had long since negotiated the pact with Dolohov and Malfoy that they could manufacture, import, and serve liquor on the premises, but even by the time Sirius arrived they had started growing pot. It was terribly dangerous but the secret was well-kept. Most of the line cooks in the roadhouse thought they were making a bastardized mezcal in the basement with steamed cactus. They had friends in the valley clear east to Twentynine Palms. 

“How were drugs the problem,” Remus prodded. 

“It was a violation of James and Lily’s pact. What we were doing.” 

The Death Eaters sent envoys sometimes to inspect the place and the strategy would be to get them drunk, which at first worked in spades. Toward the end they had had to kill one of the envoy and bury the body under stones in the mountains. Perhaps this was the beginning of something now unnameable. After that there were fewer buyers in the valley who would dare to do business with them. Some of the crop rotted and necessitated burial because burning was too dangerous. The cult encamped in the Three Sisters who were the most reliable buyers of psychedelic fungi were seduced into a new form of worship by a series of prophetic dreams. The next time an envoy of Death Eaters came up the mountain they were displaying the partially flayed corpse of one of James and Lily’s most loyal buyers on the hood of the lead truck. 

“They couldn’t prove it,” Sirius remembered, “they couldn’t — like, they knew we were, but they couldn’t prove it. Because James had hid the door to the basement so well. And only we knew about it.” 

“So how did they prove it?” 

[ He moved aside to let the faceless man in beside him in the dark back booth at the Hog’s Head. James had fixed him across the table and he looked, for perhaps the third time in their entire acquaintance, like he might cry. 

“I brought whiskeys,” said the faceless man in a wash of static. “You like whiskey, right?” 

“Sure,” said James. “Thanks.” 

Sirius couldn’t speak. Don’t do it, his entire mind was screaming. Don’t do it, don’t do it. It’s me, it can be me, will be me, should be me. The piece of his mind that was telling him this, he’d reasoned nights previous when he couldn’t sleep, was the same piece which still believed Remus could be innocent. Which believed this war might end. Which believed that after the war he might be happy and live in a cottage in the country and sleep soundly most nights and go to graduate school and eventually write a memoir. It was the piece of his mind which believed at all — which considered any manifestation of reality beyond the immediate. In short it was a piece of his mind which should be dead. He bit his lip. 

With the whiskeys they toasted one another’s health. Then James said, “I need a favor.” ] 

“Sirius?” 

The waxing crescent moon was spilling bloody blue light over the desert. In the silver shadow there was something terribly hopeful on Remus’s drawn face. “I don’t — I can’t remember,” Sirius told him. 

\--

Just before dawn they came to the ghost town of Vidal Junction. In the night they had come across the old aqueduct trickling a little sickly green-grey water but they didn’t dare drink this owing to the rumors of poisoning. They dug stills again and set up camp in the cool dewy shade underneath an abandoned trailer. In the spreading rose-golden light Remus made a fire again to cook cactus. He told Sirius perhaps in two days’ time depending on the roads and the condition of the bridges they would cross the Colorado River where it was wide and slow and had eons previous laid in a silty greenbelt out of which assorted ambitious fools had once diverted irrigation canals. Across the Colorado River was Arizona. 

They ate, and then Remus fell asleep. Sirius watched him and brushed the flies from his face when they settled near his eyes and mouth. He hovered his hand over the bandages wrapping the bad leg and felt even through the cloth the heat coming off the healing wound. He watched around at the desert. The vivid light off the pale sand was almost blinding and in the haze the distant hills appeared as miragelike blue smudges that floated further off the ground by each hour. 

At noon he woke Remus and lay down himself to sleep in the deepest shade. In a dream he remembered: the only remaining commercial establishment in Yucca Valley was an old strip joint. At some juncture it had been remodeled into an all-purpose decadence emporium of a variety that had always struck Sirius as a little uncanny, in the Freudian sense; the repressed that returns, he recalled from his first-year English seminar at the University of Washington. It had an Old West flavor via the crude gambling tables, cloudy bottles of unmarked booze behind the bar, itinerant musicians blasted on strong drugs riffing on an out-of-tune piano, and hawk-eyed strippers with razors taped to the bottoms of their heels, yet the decor was tremendously modern, all sleek black lines, matte tile spiderwebbed with gunshots, strings of glowing mood lighting powered by a hidden generator. 

The owner was by all accounts a conniving monster with no true allegiances and yet he was fair and kept secrets, which was why the Death Eaters allowed him to continue doing business, and why James and Lily continued doing business with him despite his known Death Eater affiliations. His name was Albus Dumbledore. He came out to the car to meet them and helped them carry the bushels of pot in the trunk into the dark club. They were meant to trade it for grain with a crew of longtime buyers who lived on a compound in Flamingo Heights. Dumbledore sat them at a table and brought them a bottle of particularly rank mezcal and five copitas and then he disappeared. A few of the girls who danced at night were bustling around doing odd jobs to prepare for the coming evening and they began to exchange surreptitious looks with one another, which Sirius might not have noticed had he not himself been an expert in surreptitious looks. 

[ After the ceremony, Sirius went out to the seediest pub he could find and drank himself half to death. He woke up in a drunk tank at a Muggle police precinct with bloody bruised knuckles. The old man came and let him out on bail. They went to a diner and Dumbledore bought Sirius poached eggs and toast. He ate two bites of each and then was forced to run to the toilet to vomit. When he came back out again the old man was gone. And that was the last Sirius saw him in person until the trial. 

He went to the museum and looked at the Turners. He slept that night in a disgusting Muggle hostel so vacant of a single decent or sober soul that an owl came to him in the window bearing a letter. This, too, was from the old man: 

_You may be interested to hear that your family has gathered at Broceliande. I would appreciate your eyes. — A.D._

_PS. You may try bubotuber essence next time, for a hangover… quite expensive as it must be distilled meticulously from the pus by a master of the art, and yet utterly essential, worth every cent, if I do say so myself…_

He left the hostel in the night without paying and traveled north to Penrith by train. And he was there, sleeping in alleys, drinking his dinner, skulking about his family property like a lethifold or a ghost, until the very day — ] 

Remus poured the mezcal out into the copitas. They toasted their collective health. The only way to drink this stuff was by downing it and so they did. The place was so quiet Sirius could hear the wind outside. He noticed, with mounting suspicion, that the piano was gone. And the top-shelf liquor behind the bar was gone. And the old man and all the girls were gone. And then he realized that the sound outside wasn’t wind at all…

He was shoved bodily out of the dream by a kick to the stomach. Overhead the burning silver sky was leaching color out of itself and over the desert but it was not yet dusk. He thought perhaps he had dreamed the kick but then it happened again. The culprit, hovering above him like a thundercloud, was a teenager in the full black shroud of a Death Eater. The afternoon was so hot he had removed his hood; his hair was prematurely thinning, a pale mermaidish blonde, darkened with sweat. And directly toward Sirius’s face he had leveled a crudely sawed-off shotgun. His voice, when he spoke, was reedy and feminine. “D’you think these are — ” 

“The traitors from the Pioneertown roadhouse,” said a gruffer, older voice. The owner of it had hauled Remus to his feet and sealed a massive sunburnt hand over his mouth. In the other hand he held both of Remus’s wrists behind his back. In some unseen scuffle the wound in Remus’s leg had opened again and blood was running out through the bandage and over his shoe into the colorless sand. His eyes were blank and desperate with pain. 

Sirius remembered, they had gone out back into the wind. The blowing sand obscured the light. The Cadillac was gone. They sent Lily off running up the hill and within a few moments even the red flag of her hair was invisible in the storm. 

“Someone must’ve told,” James said. As was customary in circumstances of crisis his voice was very clear and strong but his hands were shaking. He was checking his gun, as though he had not done so before they left and found there were only three remaining cartridges. “Maybe they got to the girls in the Heights.” 

Even as he said it they knew it was unlikely to be true. Then Remus said, “Where’s Peter.” 

“What do we do with them,” said the blonde with the shotgun. 

The big one shrugged. “Bring ‘em to Riddle. You know how upset he was he only got to kill Potter and the redhead.” 

Remus struggled a little at the sound of this. Casually his captor kicked his wounded leg with the steel-plated toe of his big leather boots. 

“We can’t carry them across the desert,” said the blonde over the muted suffering sound Remus made. 

“Says you.” 

“You should flash them for a car.” 

“You flash them,” said the big one acidly. “My hands are fuckin full.” 

The blonde leveled a look of distaste as though this were beneath him, but he lowered the shotgun and retrieved a shard of signaling mirror from a case at his belt. As he carefully angled this toward the setting sun Sirius grabbed his ankle and pulled it out from under him. He went down messily and Sirius heard his head thunk like a hollow melon against a stone. The mirror shattered in the dust. 

The big one let go of Remus, who staggered but didn’t fall. Sirius grabbed the shotgun from the blonde’s limp grasp and pulled the trigger but nothing happened. He tried it again and at last opened the action to see there were no cartridges inside. The big one reached out for him with the massive clutching hands, and then he too fell in the dust. Remus had hit him hard in the side of the head with his crutch. 

He remembered the flock of them, like black birds, had come pouring into the bar through the swinging doors. Among their number Peter in his very smallness looked particularly scrappy and pathetic. Something — not a smile, but not far from it — was twisting his face, wringing in the sunburnt pink doughiness of it like a wet cloth. 

[ In the ceremony, which Lily performed in the basement of the house in the Hollow, he felt the secret pulled out of own mind like a burning thread of liquid memory. Like some terrible trepanation or lobotomy without anesthetic. When it was over they all had a bit of firewhiskey and didn’t speak nor look at each other. Sirius thought Peter seemed almost relieved, as though he had not just condemned himself to be hunted. At the time he had thought, jealously, it was a simple misunderstanding of the task at hand. ] 

“Can you walk?” he asked Remus, who was knelt in the dust. The bad leg was stretched out and horribly crooked in the wrong sorts of places again. No, Remus said without sound. But he reached up and Sirius took his hands and helped him stand. 

“He signaled,” Remus croaked, “with the mirror. There’ll be a caravan — ” 

He gestured off to the west. The evening wind had started to howl out of the hills and into the collapsed trailers and the skeletal mesquite as though it had lent all the wreckage some terrible voice. “Which way’s the border,” Sirius said. 

They went limping together east into the gathering darkness. “Do you remember now,” Remus asked him, “what their proof was?” 

[ He gave the child to Hagrid out front of the burned house. He understood already the fate to which he was doomed. But it could not, he thought, be much worse than it already was. He Apparated to London, where already a confused celebratory atmosphere had taken hold in the wizarding quarters. When all was said and done it didn’t take him very long to find the rat. ] 

“Yes,” said Sirius, “I do.” 

“Where do you think he is now?” 

[ He had his wand jammed up into the fleshy laughing throat. Out of this apocalypse feeling he was trying to summon the will to perform the killing curse, never mind he hadn’t been able to do it on any of the several occasions he’d tried before. But if any feeling could do it, it must be this one. This scorched-earth feeling — devastation scraped so raw it seeped beads of watery blood. ] 

“You could never remember him,” Remus said sadly. “That’s the crux of it. You never really noticed him, did you.” 

[ The street blew apart. Like some great tectonic rift at the beginning or the end of the world. And into that gaping maw of darkness Peter slipped away laughing in the traitorous skin Sirius had helped him learn. ] 

“You think I drove him to it.” 

“It doesn’t matter what I think,” Remus said. “Where do you think he is now?” 

“With — Jesus. With them. Even now — in their caravan — ” 

“He’s more afraid of them than we are,” Remus reminded him. He could summon less and less breath and sound into his throat every word. “Do you really think he’s with them?” 

The light swept dense as rain over the desert. To the east over the great flat Sirius thought he heard the sound of engines or perhaps it was only thunder over the river in the western valley… At his feet the sand was turning to glass. He remembered he could hardly see through the blood in his eye and the lingering dizziness of being struck in the forehead. He ran for a long time and then he put Remus down in the shade at the foot of a Joshua tree like some biblical penitent. He was passed out and his face was pure white. For a shocking moment Sirius couldn’t recall his name. 

“He’s out there still,” Remus told him. “Hiding.” 

“Where?” 

[ There was someone at the door. _Nothing again nothing._ ] 

“Remus, where is he?” 

“I don’t know why you keep asking me.” 

Behind them over the dunes to the east the vivid headlights of the caravan cast their combined shadow like some ancient humanoid sigil upon the desert. Once again the wind was no longer the wind. Now, impossibly, it sounded like the sea. 

“There’s no one else left to ask.” 

“But there is one left,” said Remus. 

“Who?” 

They could hear the gleeful shouting now from the caravan. Remus reached desperately for Sirius’s left arm and pushed the sleeve up and pressed his thumb tightly against the thick blue vein. 

[ His hands were folded in his lap. He looked down at his wrist, where he could still feel the ghostly pressure of Remus’s grasp. The tattoo was old and sloppy and smudged into the skin and hardly legible. _MY GODSON,_ it read. 

“Does he speak anymore,” said a voice in the door. 

“Never when I’ve come.” This voice was familiar. “Very few of them do, you see.” 

He turned toward the sound. Two bearded shadowy faces belonged to the two voices in the door. They were lit from beneath by a soft, pale bluish light which Sirius could feel as a floodlamp into the cobwebbed corners of his soul. One of the faces belonged to Albus Dumbledore. The other belonged to Cornelius Fudge, who took a diplomatic step back when Sirius’s eyes met his. 

It took him a few attempts to speak. He imagined his vocal cords were like a dusty organ in an abandoned desert church flush with silt and grime. “How do you do,” he said. It rasped like a knife against a whetstone. 

Fudge’s mouth moved. He took another step away from the door and looked to Dumbledore with a fearful and accusatory expression, as though what he had been told to expect was horribly different than what he had found. He was holding a newspaper across his chest, twisted nervously into a tube, like a weapon with which he might kill a bothersome fly. “I’m very well, Sirius,” the old man said. He dared a smile, which moved across his face like a flag in a rising wind. “And yourself?” 

“As well as can be expected.” 

It couldn’t be real, he realized. Quite simply it couldn’t be. Perhaps the real world was the former one, in the California desert, or any other manifestation he had imagined in these untold years. This was simply too strange to be true — the old man in the door with the Minister of Magic… 

He got to his feet, bracing himself with a hand against the wall. The exertion turned his vision black but when it faded back in he saw Fudge had scrambled further away from the door and even the old man was looking down the hall to the east and then the west. Evidently he sought the guards and evidently they were nowhere in sight. 

“It’s just a simple favor I ask of you,” Sirius said. 

“What is it?” 

He pointed at Fudge, who startled. He wondered how terrible he must look in this vision of reality. “I don’t suppose — your newspaper.” 

“What about it?” 

“I do miss the crossword.” 

Fudge looked to Dumbledore, who nodded approvingly. When the Minister passed the paper through the grate by which the guards served meals Sirius could see his hand trembling in the thin pages. 

They left post-haste. He heard the echoes of their hushed whispering in the hall and then the howling of the wind and the inmates returned in the typical dread symphony. Sirius went and sat as close to the window as he could bear in the summer squall screaming through the stone and unfurled the newspaper against his lap. He had truly only meant to do the crossword but instead he found on the front page a twitching likeness of the very rat he had watched over a decade previous disappear into the burst-open London sewer squirming in the freckled clutches of a red-headed child in a red and yellow rugby polo. 

He looked toward the door again and found he was once more alone. Perhaps they had given him a fake. Or perhaps like the very sight of the men in the door it was a sort of wishful symptom of this false reality. It was unmistakably the correct rat, because it was missing a toe. The nervous balding tail which moved like a suspicious cat’s. He could recall the artful spatter of blood at his feet. The sight of the MLE officers who arrested him floating the severed finger off the ground into a plastic evidence bag with their teeth grit in disgust and horror. 

The caption: _Arthur Weasley, Head of the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office at the Ministry of Magic, reports back from his thrilling Egyptian vacation, made possible through the annual Daily Prophet Grand Prize Galleon Draw. Arthur and his family (wife Molly, and children Fred, George, Ron, and Ginny, Hogwarts students, and Charlie, dragon biologist) joined eldest son Bill, a Gringotts cursebreaker, in exploring some of the Nile’s delta’s most haunted tombs. Arthur reports that the family will spend another two weeks in Cairo before heading home for the start of the school year._

He studied the photograph. The child holding the rat was Ron, thirteen, certainly a Gryffindor by his clothing and his surname. Sirius could feel the pressure around his wrist from the dream or the real world again. 

_There is one left._ He’s with that last one, he thought; if this is real, he’s at Hogwarts. ]


	7. Chapter 7

The wheel broke as the cart went by. One of the corpses on the back of it jostled into the dust. The man who was driving the cart dismounted from his flea-bit balding mule and came around the back to inspect the shattered sun-bleached wood in the dust. “Where you going,” Sirius asked him.

The mule driver looked up. He was vaguely familiar but Sirius couldn’t place him. “Lordsburg,” he said. 

“Long way.” 

“Yeah,” said the driver, “well.” 

They left the corpses to steam in the burgeoning sun and went around back of Sirius’s family’s place. Out in the barn where the Blacks had had horses once upon a time was the wagon they had taken out from Nashville at rumor of gold. There were only three wheels left on it so Sirius and the mule driver detached the front left one and rolled it out to the cart in the road. The animals were well-trained and content to ignore the powerful reek of death. The driver’s presence seemed to comfort them. From a cubby beneath the seat of the cart he produced a bale of limp hay to keep the animals distracted whilst he and Sirius replaced the wheel. 

“Want a cup of coffee or something,” Sirius asked the mule driver when they’d fixed the cart. 

“What?” 

“Just — it’s a long way.” 

They went in the house. The mule driver washed his hands diligently with lye soap and silty water in the basin Sirius had brought up that morning from the well out back. Sirius put the kettle over the embers in the grate to heat up the dregs of the coffee he’d made for himself at sunrise before he’d gone out to fix the fence on the north end of the range. The mule driver looked around the house carefully staying away from the old and decaying finery as though he might dirty those things by touching them. “Thought you might have someone dead,” he said at last. 

“I’ve given them all to you by now,” Sirius said, “every last one. There’s no more. Except me.” 

“There’s one more,” said the mule driver. He accepted the chipped enamel cup of steaming burnt coffee Sirius pressed into his hand. The harsh lye soap had gotten most of the dirt and grime off them but there was still a rime of filth under his fingernails. 

Sirius wondered if he dug the graves too. “Not here,” he said. 

“No. Not here.” 

“Then where?” 

“When are you going to snap out of this bullshit,” said the mule driver. He sat heavily on the three-legged stool by the fire. His boots were falling apart and his leather chaps had worn through at the knee. He couldn’t have been older than thirty-five but his brow was wrinkled with sun and the weight of some unnameable suffering. “It’s been twelve fucking years.” 

“Do you think I’m here of my own damn volition?” 

“I think you are. I think you would find a way to leave if you really wanted to. I think maybe you’re afraid.” 

“What of?” 

“That it’ll hurt,” said the mule driver. “And it will. I suppose you’ve sense to be afraid.” 

Sirius leant against the dusty adobe hearth and poured himself the remnants of the gritty coffee in the kettle. “How long did you say it’s been?” 

“Near on twelve years.” 

“Long time to be homesteading out here.” 

The mule driver downed the rest of the coffee in the enamel cup. “It isn’t working,” he said. He stood and brushed the dust from his leathers. “We need to try another.” 

“What?” 

“Do you trust me?” 

“Why would I trust the undertaker?” 

“I’m not the undertaker. I just drive the cart.” 

Sirius tried to recall the last time the mule driver had come — whose body he had carried out to the cart to join the others from deeper still in the desert some with their faces chewed off by vultures. They had all blurred together at the end, the corpses, as corpses did. 

“We need to try another,” said the mule driver again. “Do you trust me?” 

“I suppose — I — ”

It changed, as though it were an image on a screen. He realized he had been dreaming about the desert probably wishfully because the oilcloth slicker and wool uniform he wore were soaked through by the endless rain. In the opposite corner of the mossy a-frame shelter Remus had drawn a fragment of sailcloth salvaged from the wreck into his lap to mend it. On the thick burnished needle Sirius saw two of his fingers were blue-white with cold. “We’re not getting out of here,” Sirius reminded him. “We’re especially not sailing out of here.” 

They had tried to send a telegraph with the equipment in the shelter but the lines had been cut by the storm which had wrecked their ship in the graveyard against the spine of the island. Enclosed in a waterproof box with the telegraph equipment were blankets and supplies and directions to navigate a trail north toward the nearest town and yet the same storm still howled like some vengeful ghost in the thick forest. 

“It’s to wear,” Remus said, “like a poncho. When the storm dissipates. When we walk.” 

“Remus, this is the most impassable forest in the world.” 

“So?” 

“We’re not leaving here.” 

“Yes we are.” 

Sirius turned over toward the wall of the shelter and listened to the sea pound furiously on the rocks below like a jilted lover upon the door. Like he himself had gone and pounded on Remus’s door in that dingy flophouse in Pioneer Square not six weeks previous. He wondered if anything had washed up yet from the wreck, but he hadn’t even known what the ship was carrying. Certainly corpses had washed up by now if the beasts in the sea had not got ahold of them. Two mornings ago he had awoken at dawn and watched orcas swim behind the ship, the jagged battle-broken glass ridge of their dorsal fins cutting the breakers… or perhaps that too had been a dream… 

“We can’t leave,” Sirius told him. “We’ll freeze to death. And there’s bears in the woods.” 

Remus didn't answer. Finally Sirius turned over and looked at him. He was diligently sewing still with his lips pursed in concentration. Outside the a-frame the forest was vengefully alive. He could hear the sea but could not even see it through the thick jungle foliage and the hanging moss. 

“It’s like a prison,” Sirius said wonderingly. 

“No it’s not.” Remus didn’t look up from the sewing. “Not at all. You’ve been in prison. This door’s fucking open. There isn’t even a door at all.” 

“That was — that’s not what I mean.” 

“You would’ve preferred, you told me, rather than prison, that they put you out in the strait alone with just a rowboat. Is that true?” 

“Well — ”

“You said you would’ve given anything for that. That you proposed it to the judge at your trial even. But, you know, you love lying to me…” 

“I do not _love_ — ”

“Right. We weren’t going to talk about that this time.” 

Sirius sighed and covered his face with his hands. 

“You said if they condemned you to execution you were going to ask them to shoot arrows at you while you ran in a field. Is that true?” 

“Not precisely,” Sirius admitted. “I knew they wouldn’t sentence me to death.” 

“So you didn’t really mean any of that shit, it’s better to try to live against all odds than just to lie there and die, et cetera, just bar talk, eh?” 

“To be completely honest I was trying to seduce you.” 

“Well it worked,” Remus said. In his lap he rotated the scrap of sailcloth to begin repairing another torn section. “Look at us now. It’s karmic retribution perhaps.” 

“It’s not _my fault_ — ”

“I know it’s not. It’s just rather funny, isn’t it…” 

“You’ve got the darkest damn sense of humor of anyone I know.” 

“Except for yourself.” 

“Yeah. Except for myself.” 

He sat up and had some of the hardtack and salt pork which had been left in the telegraph box with the blankets and watched at the forest and the thin groaning trees. Eventually he dared to step out into the rain and look down over the sea. He could feel Remus watching him from inside the a-frame. A single corpse had washed up on the beach, a shockingly soft form against the salt- and sun-bleached stones and logs piled against the shore by the storms. Otherwise not even the bones of the ship were visible anymore in the roiling black waters. All along the headland the wind was dragging the rain down from the low cloudmass in opaque tulle sheets like the sails of some great schooner unbraiding in a stiff breeze. The wind was blowing easterly driving the storm inland where it would collapse over the continent and already the darkest clouds were far off over the mountains. 

Sirius went back to Remus in the shelter. “It’s moving off,” he said. 

Remus looked up. “We can leave whenever you want then.” 

“I keep saying — ”

“You’re not as trapped here as you think you are,” Remus said. “It’s the fiction you tell yourself because it hurts too badly.” 

“What hurts too badly?” 

“The real world, obviously.” 

“Did you get hit in the head or something? This is the real world.” 

Remus looked back down at the sailcloth. “Whatever you say,” he said. 

He had always been prone to fits of mysticism as long as Sirius had known him. He was from a homesteading family in the Cascades and claimed to have seen the bipedal ape-like cryptid the Salish called _sasq’ets_ moving in the trees at dusk on the back of the property. The reasons he had gone to sea rather than follow in the footsteps of relations who had mapped the temperate coastal jungle and the drab rolling badlands of the Okanagan had never precisely been illuminated. 

“What are you abandoning back home,” Remus asked, all-too-casually, “if you die here.” 

“Nothing. There’s nothing there — ”

“That’s a lie. You know that. I thought you learned that.” 

“Learned what?” 

“It’s not over. It’s not finished, I keep trying to tell you.” 

“What the fuck are you talking about?” 

“You’ve lost your damn mind,” Remus said, getting up. He had gathered the hardtack and salt pork into the pockets of his oilcloth coat. The poncho he’d cobbled together out of sailcloth he offered to Sirius. “You’ve been in the wilderness too long.” 

“How long?” 

“Twelve years.” 

“Twelve — what?” 

“It was a terrible waste,” Remus said. “It was easiest for all of them in their rewriting of the narrative to just put both of us away. So here we are. And you’re the only one who knows the truth.” 

“What truth?” 

Remus sighed long-sufferingly. “Do you remember what we talked about in California?” 

In the trees the wind spoke many voices. He was driving in an empty city where every storefront was boarded. Then he sat on a lonely rooftop and watched the stinking black water rise until it came to the toes of his boots. He walked with Remus on the moor and on the flanking roads so overgrown and green it felt like trekking through some Arthurian fable. The weak September sun dappling through the thick leaf cover upon the gravel and the dust. At last it rained. They walked below a tall white cliff unspeaking. He sat on the pale rose comforter folded at the foot of the bed and waited, heart slamming in his throat, for Remus to climb the fire escape around back. 

“It’s not stopped bleeding,” Remus said when he came through the window. The rain and the humidity had curled his hair artfully over his forehead. “Could you help?” 

They’d fought in the night as animals and had not spoken about it. As the creature had been so was Remus not much more than bones. The old man had sent him backpacking in the wilds of Eastern Europe for independent packs, where he’d caught a blood infection by mosquito in May 1981. Sirius healed the bite wound at his shoulder with magic and Remus looked past him into a corner of the stucco ceiling where Sirius later noticed a spider had built a monumental web. When their eyes met — accidentally, as most things — Sirius kissed him. 

Here was the crux — the linchpin. Let me do it again, he thought, desperately, for the love of god, let me do it differently this time… 

From this dream he woke in a tall tower. Someone was calling his name from outside so he went to the window. In the pale pre-dawn light Remus was out on the lawn. He had long since been forbade against coming to this place but this missive as many others he had ignored. 

“I’ve been calling you for an hour,” Remus said. In the quietude of the night — it was so still not even a bird sang — he did not have to shout to be heard from on high. 

“I was sleeping.” 

“Dreams?” 

“Funny ones…” 

“You need to come down,” Remus called to him exasperatedly. “This can’t go on much longer. Do you even know why you’re here?” 

“My parents,” Sirius reminded him, fruitlessly. “Something — the heir — my brother’s wreck — ” 

“It’s not real,” Remus said, rather listlessly, as though this were a song he had sung a thousand times. “None of this is real.” 

“Prove it.” 

“Okay. Jump.” 

Sirius was shocked; it was at least twenty meters down from the high tower into the long dew-wet grass. “I’ll kill myself,” he told Remus. 

“You’ve been saying that for twelve years.” 

“I have?” 

“It’s your brain patching itself up,” Remus said. “It’s incredible psychology. It’s like a scab over a wound. It’s less painful to believe this than reality.” 

“Which is?” 

“You’re the only one who knows that it’s not finished. That the rat’s still alive. That he’s with Harry.” 

The seams were pulling apart again. It seemed the tower room further separated from the ground by steady increments. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Sirius shouted. He could hardly see Remus anymore amidst the thick fog which had rolled to the battlements from the distant forest. “How can you expect me to believe that?” 

“Because you can’t remember why you’re here.” The voice echoed until there was nothing left of it at all. “You don’t even know what this place is.” 

At first Sirius thought this assertion was ridiculous. Of course he knew. But at last he turned away from the window and found to not much surprise that the room had no definition. The chamber was hewn of rough black stone, cold, still, smelling of rot. The bed in which he had woken from the dreams was gone. Everything was gone. Impossibly, inexorably, he could hear the sea… 

He turned into the window again. The ocean was visible far off over the tangle of winter vines like a bare scrape of slate. On the sill where he’d braced his palms someone had long ago inscribed a letter N in bloody red paint. He traced a finger over the sigil and looked out again over the sea. And he recalled what Remus had said: _It’s not finished._

It was a hollow place. There was something else behind the walls. The door behind him opened as by an invisible hand and he darted out into the hallway seeking the remainder of this memory. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d left the room. Perhaps he had never left the room. The rest of the house was shabby but had once been very fine; it reminded him of his childhood at Grimmauld Place, at Broceliande, at Slaughter Hall in the Cotswolds, at Chateau Des Yeux, the Lenoir family property near Orléans, where he and his brother had once found scattered human bones in the forest. Portraits hung the walls crookedly and dusty vases bearing bouquets of rotting roses were displayed on plinths as offerings to never-present gods. He couldn't remember ever being in the house before and yet an old nostalgic familiarity made him certain it was haunted. There were eyes in every corner of darkness and behind every ajar door. And yet they could not see him. 

He went outside into the yard. Judging by the misshapen topiary and the fountain and mossy flowerbeds evidently it had once been kept up in grand style but it was so overgrown now that any line where the maintained property had ended and the forest began had long since dissolved. The wind swept guttingly across the property, smelling of the coming storm marked hieroglyphically upon the dense winter clouds. A gravel path cut west into the vines toward the beach and he followed it. Remus was standing out at the end of the wreckage of an old dock. The stiff wind had got in his hair and the hood of his windbreaker and pulled at the fabric as though it were a flag. The surf was swollen and black and vengeful. Behind them both the lighthouse flashed a pulse out into the coming storm. 

Sirius went out to join Remus on the dock. Already the wind was strong. As some offering from the distant mystery of the open sea it carried the smell of salt and winter. 

[ He thought he remembered the last storm had swept away most of it and through Remus would wander out onto the crooked pilings by means of a few slippery boards to watch near-blindly at the ocean like a captain’s widow Sirius didn’t dare to. When they went inside they would put the radio on to listen for the forecast as they had done together in the storms before. In the last drags of sun the evening previous he had brought dry wood inside for the stove and secured the chickens who normally roamed wild in the coop Remus had built for them a few summers previous. The light flashed again clear across the horizon into the indistinct gradient between sea and sky, where it blew some seam apart. “It’s all ready,” he called to Remus. “We should go inside.” 

Remus turned to him. The storm like an evil manifest aura which framed him against the sea. “Where?” he said. ]

When Sirius turned he saw the lighthouse was gone and with it the house, the tangle of vines, the low weather-beaten spine of the island. In their place was a possessed black fortress lashed by the dark bitter surf. The quietude before the coming storm was rife with echoing cries. He recalled he had seen this place before when the officers had brought him up from the boat manacled and exhausted, shuffling on the path; at the depot back in London before the long train voyage to the Scottish coast they had given him lovage for complacency, and at the sight of the castle the dose began to wear off, like the end of the hot water in the bath in the winter mornings threading a cold, stony dread into his very bones. Panic as ungraspable and silvery as liquid mercury had beset him then like a dream or a fever clasping his heart and lungs and constricting. It was bleeding into his mind by way of the stiff salt wind into his eyes and his mouth and it carried endless, clattering shrieking bolstered by the manic percussion which was the incorrigible fact of his own heartbeat. 

It had begun then. It subsumed itself. They were eating things from his mind. It was not so much that he had elected to believe something else as that it had been forced upon him. The real world had gone under, in its unbearable heaviness, and something else floated… 

When he turned back toward the dock again Remus was gone. He had never been there. The cold black wind seized what was left of Sirius and buffeted. His hair, his teeth, bones, ink, the hollow moth-eaten mind which was the reliquary of memory real and otherwise, each shard polished clean and bright as the inside of an oyster shell and indistinguishable from any other… 

The surf roiled in whitecaps around the isolate pilings sucking and clapping like the devouring maw of some unreckonable beast. Inside the fortress the pitch of the symphonic shrieking shifted feverishly. He understood there was no time to collect any more kernels of certainty long since strewn throughout the castle and across the sea. He remembered what was necessary. What was necessary was that it was not finished. 

He put on the other skin and leapt. 

[ The dog in the road stood and trotted off into the thick dusk forest. For a long moment they watched the yellow headlights pool in the place where it had been. At last Remus leant back in the passenger’s seat again, folding his arms protectively over his chest. Sirius picked his foot up heavily off the brake and the car lurched forward again into the gathering darkness. 

“Of course I remember,” he told Remus, voice sounding overloud in the shell-shocked silence. “What I said. In that letter — in all the letters.” 

Remus didn’t say anything. He was watching out the window at the road turning to gravel and the hanging moss thickening in the dark trees. At last rather contemplatively he passed a hand over his bare skull. What he was thinking was somehow obvious: that there would never be any unhaunted forest again. Even this familiar one was possessed now by the memory of its false mirror. 

“It’s always with me,” Sirius went on. “Something underneath. Even when I thought it was gone it was just buried.” 

“Buried,” Remus echoed. 

“Yeah. You can’t bury everything, you know. It comes — ”

“I know.” 

“I don’t take it back,” Sirius told him, “is what I’m trying to tell you.” 

“You couldn’t if you wanted to,” Remus said. “Just as I couldn’t if I wanted to.” 

“Do you want to?” 

Remus sighed. He passed his hand over his head again, palm rustling against the bristles. “No,” he said softly. 

“Then it’s decided.” 

They drove onward deeper into the forest. At last, following some uncertain directive, Sirius put the headlights out and drove by the scant moonlight dappling through the heavy treecover onto the broken gravel. The deep blue shadow etched hollows in Remus’s face. In a shrieking viola pitch above the low tone of music on the radio they could hear the crickets and the frogs in the flooded woods. Together they drove into the darkness until the crowded watching forest became somewhere else. ] 

When he breathed this world awake and swallowed a mouthful of vinegarish salt water he understood the torn night sky in this dream of the North Sea was but one station on some great wheel. He swam onward. In all the night he did not look back again.

**Author's Note:**

> This story was extremely difficult to write, and it wouldn’t exist without K and M. Thank you so much for believing in me and for always giving me something new and surprising to think about, in this and in everything. 
> 
> [HERE](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/post/167622431230/hey-so-it-should-come-as-no-surprise-to-anyone) are a few of the reference points for this story.


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